Moon Cake Festival

Today is the day of the moon cake or mid-autumn festival, which is celebrated in several Asian countries. I was invited to dinner at Amy's on Sunday night to mark it. It is similar to the US Thanksgiving, not so much in its context, but in the sense that it is a 4-day holiday where you go back home to be with your family. Amy, Shen-Chih, Shu-Chun, and JinHee were explaining the different Taiwanese, Chinese and Korean traditions around it. It occurs on the day of the full moon, and apparently it is typical to have a barbeque outside in the moonlight. Also, family members tell the different stories about it, which seemed to be about people or rabbits that somehow ended up living on the moon. However, their grasp of the stories was about as firm as my grasp on how North Carolinians came to be called Tar Heels-- there are a lot of different stories about it, and no one was totally sure what the basis of the holiday was. You are supposed to eat moon cakes, although Amy didnt actually serve them, because she was so disdaining of the quality of the mooncakes in Lyon she didn't think they were worth buying. But here is a pic of one.