Happy Mid-Autumn Festival, guys! 中秋节快乐!

Mid-Autumn Festival is one of those festive events that being celebrated extensively by people in Hong Kong. I'm so lucky I'm able to experience this festive event in Hong Kong and in this post I'm gonna share with you the euphoria that I experienced here :)

As the post is quite long... with some words and pictures, I'll post it in two parts so you won't be bored reading all of these :D

In Indonesia, we also celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival, but in a very small scope. We only have some shops and hotels sell mooncakes in tins and by piece, but not the big celebration. While in Hong Kong, you'll notice the decorations of Mid-Autumn festival in most places which is dominated by rabbit and the moon.

Another difference between Indonesia and Hong Kong's Mid-Autumn Festival is the massive advertisements of mooncake, hallmark tradition of Mid-Autumn Festival, that you can easily find everywhere in Hong Kong: in the Hong Kong's Mass Transit Railway (MTR), on the bus and inside the malls.

Hong Kong has soooo many different brands of bakery that produce and sell mooncakes. Every bakery tries hard to push the advertisement and locate it in the strategic places. Mooncake is really small (less than 10 cm in diameter) but the advertisement could possess the whole wall. Thus in that big mooncake advertisement, you actually will only see a really small mooncake! Moreover, they rarely show the whole mooncake. Usually the picture will only show quarter of mooncake, to be able to show you the glorious yolk (which represent the moon!) inside the cake. It's really interesting for me to see all the advertisement.

There are several types of mooncake with different skins, fillings and of course, different prices. There's the traditional one which made with lotus seed paste, date paste, mung bean and completed with salted duck egg yolk as the fillings. Along with the rising awareness of health, people think that this traditional mooncake is too sweet and oily (and cholesterol!). Thus, now there's now type of mooncake which is called as snow skin mooncake. In my opinion, the snow skin mooncake is similar to mochi ice cream in Japan. They don't bake it and it need to be kept in the freezer or it will melt. Made with glutinous rice and no egg-yolk filling, snow skin mooncake is perceived as a healthier choice compared to the traditional one. However, you'll always find long queue in both traditional and snow skin mooncake store.

So far, I've eaten the Wing Wah's and Mei Xin's traditional mooncake. I have one pack of Kee Wah's in my cupboard but I'm gonna save it a lil bit longer :p

The Mid-Autumn Festival is celebrated on 15 September 2016, but you can already feel the atmosphere since the end of August with all the decorations and mooncakes thingy. People started to sell many goods which related to light: lantern with lamp, light-stick, bandana with blinking crown, gooey-minion-yoyo that can light up when it hits something and so on. It's all about lights!

Hong Kong people will bring along those things when they celebrate the full moon on 15 September night, while enjoying the colorful lantern display in some public places and having their evening picnic with the love ones.

I'm gonna share with you guys about the lantern display and more fascinating pictures in my next post. Stay tuned!