Full Moon Festival

Monday 15^th Sept. 2008

This weekend, being the Autumn Equinox full moon, Vietnamese children celebrated the Moon Festival and I took pictures from the balcony of the little ones in the infants’ school downstairs having their very noisy celebration complete with Chinese dragon, all dressed up to sing and dance for the parents in the school yard.

Some of Mark’s students brought Moon cakes, lanterns and balloons for our very own party at school! Moon cakes being symbolic of the moon are round, and come in several different varieties, all about the size of the palm of your hand and decorated with traditional patterns. These cakes come in beautifully elaborate red presentation boxes. The most common cake consists of a kind of soft cake-pastry covering a savoury filling of an egg yolk or green bean paste, I think, which I didn’t find very appetising. More to my taste was a more up-market variety that seemed to be filled with a fruit and nut paste, which was very rich.

On Sunday I was invited to the Cinema by Mister Michael, who was going with two of the Vietnamese teachers at the High school where he teaches twice a week, so as Mark was otherwise engaged, I went along. The film was ‘Death Race’; not exactly to my taste, but what else could I expect, going with three young men? Afterwards, they took us to a Restaurant for an evening meal. When I say they took us, what I mean is, we followed them on Michael’s bike, in the dark, weaving in and out of the traffic on little back roads for a good ten to fifteen minutes, hoping we wouldn’t lose them, as we had no idea where we were, before we reached this very nice place out of the town and off the main road. It was nice to be away from the constant noise of traffic and blaring horns.

One of the young men Mr Tho, is not only very good looking, but also the son of the extremely rich owner and founder of this school. He teaches physics and his beautiful young girlfriend, who used to be one of his students, met us there. Their English isn’t so good, but the other teacher, also called Mr Tho, loves to talk. He’s small, wears glasses, looks a bit of a geek, but is great fun and we had a really good time. By the time we were ready to leave, it was pouring down, yet again. We never know when, but at this season it’s bound to rain some time every day.