Mid Autumn Festival. Moon cakes: some only slightly better than Christmas fruitcake, some worse, some delightfully yummy. I personally prefer the sesame or red bean filled ones. They come in all sizes, but always round and always bearing the ingredient inside in Chinese character on the top (no help to the illiterate me). The Mid Autumn Festival celebrates the harvest moon and is a time for eating moon cakes with your family while looking up at the full moon is a park or backyard. My students brought me several bunches of these always surprises cakebits and, as a foreign teacher, the international affairs office of HIT always gifted us with a beautiful tin case filled with only the most expensive moon cakes in Harbin. Strangely enough the most expensive moon cake is a sort of sugary bean filling surround a whole hard-boiled egg yolk (I am assuming the yolk resembles the full moon?). I didn't mind the surrounding filling but the dry egg yolk was less than exciting. I enjoyed the less expensive varieties. I was told that some of them have meat but thankfully none have yielded such delicacies (to my relief).
Golden Week. National Holidays in China. Three times a year the whole country (almost) goes on vacation for a week (maybe longer over the Chinese New Year) and though government is working to change this, it is a time-honored tradition and was ever present during the most recent Golden Week. A country of 1 billion people all going on vacation, a country of exceedingly mobile people all traveling to somewhere, wreaks a bit of havoc on transportation systems (which consequentially do not get vacation at this time).
I too decided to seize my chance of a lifetime to see a little bit of China's countryside and also to visit a family and farm where my father has been working the past couple years. The "small" town of Hunchun (only the size of Winnipeg) is also called the Last Stop because it is literally in the corner of China between the ominous shoulder of Russia and cold front of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).
I was visiting the Shell family of Timothy and Naomi and their 4 "eager beavers" of Mary Frances, Ruth Anna, Miriam and little Lyte. They live and manage a farm there consisting of all sorts of cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, a few dogs, lots of cats and a beautiful bunch of hills covered in pine and aspen like trees. I am sure there are more things but I was a little confused about who managed what and where and, as I was sort of delighting in long walks in the clean air and a very exciting new family to hang out with, I chose to relax rather than be inquisitive. (I can always ask questions next visit). It was a wonderful visit! I spent lots of time baking with Naomi and reading books to the family (yes the whole family listened to me read Prince Caspian and the Magician's Nephew and yes I did get hoarse). We spent a day with a few other families out in the country near to another town called Yanji picking pingguoli (apple-pears) and looking for 'pretty' rocks. The girls are also avid collectors of all sorts of rocks that end up in piles and jars various places.
Yes, those are sparse details but really the most exciting part of my Golden Week experience was, as I was mentioning before, the travel there and back….
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