Lady White and the Mid Autumn Festival

So in case you haven't noticed. I am a horrible blogger. I didn't mean to write what I wrote about two days ago. I meant to share a folktale that takes place in Hangzhou, specifically the West Lake. But I did I. No. Also, the Mid-Autumnal Festival was this past weekend. Did I even so much as mention that? No.

So sorry about failing.

Alright. So. The story from West Lake. Just to let you know, it's Hangzhou's equivalent to Romeo and Juliet (which we all know just ended so well), and the story is set during the Song Dynasty, when Hangzhou was the capitol of China. Also, if you really want to know, Leifeng Pagoda is actually the pagoda me and my friends went to two weekends ago.



I thought about rewriting it myself, but I actually just found a pretty decent retelling of the story. In some versions Xu (the man known as Blue) and Bai (Lady White) met when Xu was just a boy, and he had actually saved her life. But apparently that was added on or something. So his retelling of it is fairly accurate. So please go to this site to read about "The Legend of the White Snake".

Now. Mid-Autumn Festival, or rather, Mooncake Festival.

For those of you who don't know, tt's sort of like the Chinese equivalent to our Thanksgiving holiday. The festival is always held on the 15th day of the 8th month of the lunar calendar, so sometime in September or early October.

It's meant to celebrate the end of the fall harvest, and the main food everyone eats are mooncakes.


They're actually really good. Well, okay to be perfectly honest there was this one kind that made me want to gag. I think it was the worst thing I've ever tasted. And I've tasted a lot of weird things. But I had one that looks like the mooncake to the far right in the picture above, and I think it was my favorite. It had an egg in it or something. Sometimes they fill mooncakes with meat, or bean paste (everything is bean paste here. Don't get something just cause you think it looks like chocolate. Twelve times out of ten it will be bean paste, not chocolate. It's never chocolate). But like I said, they're pretty good. Just avoid the ones that have an especially dark color.

There's also a legend that's associated with the Moon Festival. So I'll tell it to you. Or write it to you. Cause my computer can't transform me into a hologram.

Chang'e and Houyi the Archer
Chang'e and her husband, Houyi, were immortals that lived in heaven. One day, the ten sons of the Jade Emperor had transformed themselves into ten suns, scorching the earth. Because his sons would not stop even after he ordered them to, the Jade Emperor asked Houyi for help. With bow and arrow in hand, Houyi shot down the nine sons, sparing only one son to provide light to earth. The Jade Emperor, displeased with Houyi's violent solution to stopping his sons, banished Houyi and Chang'e to earth, to live out their days as mortals.


Having lost her immortality, Chang'e became extremely miserable. Houyi, concerned for his wife and wanting to see her smile again, began on a long and perilous quest to find the pill of immortality so the two of them could once again be immortals in the celestial plane. He finally met the Queen Mother of the West who agreed to give him the pill, and told him each person would only need half the pill to be fully immortal.


Bringing the pill home, he stored it in a case and told Chang'e not to open it. He then left home for a little bit. Chang'e, her curiosity getting the better of her, opened the case and found the pill just as she heard Houyi return home. Afraid that Houyi would catch her discovering the pill, she accidentally swallowed the entire thing. Because she swallowed all of it instead of only half of it, she began to float into the sky, eventually landing on the moon, where she would live for the rest of her days as the Goddess of the Moon.


So yea. That's what I've been meaning to write/tell you about. Hope you appreciate it.

In other news, everyone here smokes between classes, so merely leaving the building during the 30 minute break is probably taking minutes if not years off my life. Oh you Europeans, smoking. Sure, you may think you look cool now, but just wait until they have to cut a hole in your throat and you lose you ability to speak on your own and have to sound like a robot. I'm sure that will attract all the ladies. Or men. Depending on who you are.

That reminds me. Here, the bathrooms don't have a security wall that's usually in boys bathrooms. So yes, I did see a guy, his back turned, using a urinal. It was great. Awesome even. Superb.

Also they told us if we're late 40 minutes, it's the equivalent to missing 2 classes. So why come into class at all? Some kid today came in late, and that's all I could think about.

In other news someone called me a foreigner in Chinese, "laowai". But that's all they said when I passed. Thank you old Chinese dudeman. If I knew more Chinese I would have said yes, but I don't even know that. The Chinese language is very different from English. A lot simpler actually. They don't have male/female/nuetral forms of words or articles. Thank God. I hated that in German and Latin. Ugh. Dear Lord. The Latin. Endings in Latin are horrible, even if it's not spoken. It's horrible. HORRIBLE.

So have fun with your life and stuffs people. Until the next time I decide to actually tell you something about China.