Over the moon

Well, after working a full eleven and a half hours every week for nearly four weeks now, I think it’s high time we had a holiday. And, what do you know, it’s 'National Holiday' time. Not only that, but we'll be celebrating the 'Mid Autumn Festival' shortly too!

Not a moment too soon.

Teaching’s tough. Okay, the hours in front of students don’t sound a lot and we can have up to five hours off between lessons, but with the preparation time, the time spent tweaking things and the constant feeling that I could be doing this better, I for one am exhausted. There’s the frustration too, of giving a lesson to one class and it going down really well and then giving the same lesson to another class and it falling completely flat. Why does that happen? What should I be doing differently? And, considering I’m only a pretendy teacher in the first place, should I be worried at all?

Perhaps, perhaps not. But it’s doing my head in so I’ll change the subject.

The Mid Autumn Festival (or ‘Moon Festival’) happens annually on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the Chinese lunar calendar which, this year, falls on 6th October in the good old western calendar.

It’s the time when the moon appears at its brightest and largest. In the west, we call it the ‘Harvest Moon’ and, in fact, the ‘Moon Festival’ is pretty much akin to our Harvest Festival (or ‘Thanksgiving’, I guess). As the other name suggests, we’re also bang in the middle of autumn by lunar reckonings.

(It’s all a bit ironic really since there’s more chance of seeing the sky raining blood and frogs than of being able to actually see the moon through the constant grubby white cloud cover.)

So there’ll be no “We plough the fields and scatter…” for us this year. Instead, the traditional thing to do is simply gaze at the moon (if you can see it), sing Moon Poems and eat (you see a pattern developing here) Moon Cakes.

Sure they sound like something you eat to get stoned, but these are little buns filled with lots of delicious things like sesame, red bean and lotus seed pastes, melon seeds, coconut, walnuts, almonds, minced meats, dates, little salted duck egg yolks, ham, dried flower petals, orange peel and plenty of sugar and fat. The cakes are decorated with symbolic clouds, moons and (I’m not quite sure why) rabbits. Think of them as a kind of rich fruitcake or plum pudding and, to be frank, you’ll still be nowhere near knowing what they’re like.

The main thing, though, is that we get next week off work. This isn't actually anything to do with moons and mid autumn but is the so-called 'National Holiday' to mark the founding of the People's Republic of China on 1st October 1949.

According to Chinese custom, we’re leaving holiday preparations to the last minute. But the plan is to go west to a town called Kangding, a place rich in Tibetan culture although not quite in Tibet itself. The journey, let alone the destination, is meant to be spectacular as you rise about 3000 metres into the Daxue Shan mountain range along treacherous winding roads before dropping into a vast plain nestled among the peaks.

I’ll keep you posted.