Mid Autumn Festival

Tuesday was my birthday, and also the day of Mid Autumn Festival which is apparently the 2nd largest event in the Chinese calendar. People get together with their families and have nice meals and then stay up all night playing with lanterns and watching the full moon. It's all something to do with a man who was given potion that would make him fly by a god, but then his wife stole it whilst he was out one day and then she flew to the moon and couldn't come back. Apparently she has a jade rabbit to keep her company up there.

Rabbit lantern display

I got quite a few cards in the post, in fact some women sharing the lift with me commented that I had a lot of post, which lead to a few minutes of English conversation with my neighbours, although they live in Block B not Block A so we went our different directions after the first lift.

I went down to Victoria Park, which is on Hong Kong island, to check out the lanterns displays. The park was full of people milling around. There were lots of children and adults with lanterns, some of which were traditional and papery looking and made in the shape of fish, whilst others were more like inflatable toys with tiny torches in the middle. I even saw one little boy with a Buzz Lightyear lantern. There were lots of signs saying that lanterns with candles inside were forbidden.

A lantern tower in Victoria Park

Lantern bamboo screen

Hanging lanterns

The most exciting thing about Mid Autumn Festival, other than the pretty lighting, is that everyone gets the day after off work to recover from staying up staring at the moon all night. I wasn't exactly staring at the moon, but we did hit Central for some birthday celebrations! The Wednesday holiday was thus spent doing not very much at all.

It was back to school on Thursday, where this week I've been doing a lesson on Acceptance Speeches for Awards Ceremonies. We acted a scene from Harry Potter in last week's classes and the kids voted on which student was the Best Harry, Best Ron etc, so this week they prepared speeches and made paper plate awards and then we held an awards ceremony and I announced the results. It was great fun, even the fifth time round!

Houston collecting his Best Harry award

Carmen gives her Best Hermione acceptance speech

Tonight was parents night, so I had to stay in school until 9pm (that's a 13 hour day at work!). Rich and I appeared to be there just so the parents could smile and stare at us, as the actual presentation to the parents was all in Cantonese. The teachers sat next to me kept translating bits though, and seeing all the parents of the children I teach reminded me that I've actually got the potential to have a big impact on all of their lives. Not in a scary way, more in a motivational way that makes me want to get all our lunchtime and after school activities up and running, and spend less time doing lesson plans in the staffroom and more time out in the playground chatting with the students.

Jude and Fiona (friends from my uni course) have arrived for a few days stopover en route to New Zealand. They're too jet lagged for socialising tonight but we're hopefully going to do touristy things all weekend.