Mid-Autumn Festival

This past Monday was the Mid-Autumn Festival here in China.  They compare it to our Thanksgiving.  It is a time when Chinese families get together and enjoy a meal with each other while watching the moon.  I heard about this celebration about a week before the big day, and got pretty excited about it.  I'm not really sure why I got so excited...Maybe the word "Thanksgiving" created a natural reaction in my body that subconscously made me think of my mother's Thanksgiving feast.  I don't know...but I was excited.  So...it was cool, but it didn't make "all of my wildest dreams come true"(little shout out to you Bekah).  In other words, it wasn't everything that I had been building it up to be.  First of all the city I live in is so big that the polution literally blots out the sun.  So, the moon had no chance.  That's okay I've seen the moon before I was more excited about the "feast."  Well...then I remembered that my only Chinese friends are those at the local universities...and they don't have kitchens.

So instead I had a fun night of hanging out with some friends on campus playing guitar and singing songs in Chinese and English.  We even let off one of the traditional Chinese floating/flying fire lanterns.  I still don't have a new camera so this is a picture off google images.  Ours looked like this but "China" red.

Yet again my imagination and expections slightly got the best of me after hearing about the lantern.  I started picturing something really magical and majestic like from the movie "Tangled."  Yes, I've seen it and will say proudly that I enjoyed it (Pretty much anything made by Pixar I will see).  Well...our latern didn't really want to fly.  We held it as it filled up with hot air, but it didn't want to go anywhere.  We were starting to feel the pressure as a crowd started forming around us to see it fly away.  Finally, after having to wait much longer than normal (or so my Chinese friends said) our lantern took to the air.  As it started to rise my friends began to explain to me that the latern represents hope.  The hope of the people, family, and county.  The words weren't far from his mouth when our lantern came crashing back down......happy Mid-Autumn Festival everyone!