Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival

It's currently Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival. Since 70% of this country has Chinese ancestry, this is a big deal here - in fact it's big like Easter or even Christmas for westerners.

They have lantern festivals, parades, street entertainment and it's the season to eat plenty of mooncakes.

 

Mooncakes are a pastry cake inside which is a paste made from lotus seed, red bean, yam, pumpkin or a wide variety of other flavours. Then inside the paste is one or more salted duck egg yolk. They are considered quite a delicacy and are about $10 each! (due to the cost of duck eggs apparently). I haven't tried one yet, kind of put off by the salted egg yolks.

Anyway - we headed down to Chinatown last weekend to check out the big parade and entertainment etc. Miles of streets were cordoned off and decorated with amazing lights, lanterns and chinese decorations. We ate some delicious food (seafood pineapple rice for me, 'drunken chicken' for Blake) and then wandered around soaking up the atmosphere and trying to negotiate our way through the crowds.

We also visited the lantern festival display (you had to buy tickets) to go see the massive lanterns made out of silk. There were castles, dragons, animals, all sort of things. Although they were pretty amazing, we were bored in 10 minutes and so headed off to watch a show with some acrobatic/cortortionsist type performers - quite an eye-opener.

 

Blake and the dragon

Bovine display

 

And just in case you missed my big belly above, here's another shot, the next day at the Botanical gardens. It must be getting bigger, people are now staring at it.