A Day Off, and the Mid-Autumn Festival

Well, our day off school wasn't exactly a day off as we still had to go in and do work... BUT it meant there were lots of celebrations later on. It was China's birthday so that meant... FIREWORKS, and lots of em. It was a 23 minute fireworks display with some 32,000 rockets I believe and 400,000 people there to watch it was reported. They shot the fireworks off over the harbor and we watched from the Kowloon side, slightly behind a building or two.

The next day we joined some classmates of ours to head down to Hong Kong Island and in the Tin Hau district watched the 110th anniversary dance of the Fire Dragon. It was extremely crowded when we arrived and there was lots of little festivities going on around us, but when the main attraction came everyone paid attention. It was a 210 ft 'dragon' that had thousands of Joss sticks (incense) stuck in its back as it weaved and danced through the streets to some traditional music. Very impressive and extremely fun to see this traditional festivity with some locals who we collected some joss sticks with afterwards for good fortune (you want 3 of them).

The dragon dance would last for a few hours, but in between there were other attractions, one of which was...

bagpipes?

Beside the Fire Dragon dance was a lantern festival in Victoria Park which we stopped in to walk around. It was a fun festival weekend and we got to see a lot of the local celebrations as well as have lots of moon cakes, the official desert of the holiday. It is traditionally made with an egg inside an extremely rich, filling, bread desert. They now make them in a bunch of flavors of ice cream as well.