September 22, 2010
Today is the Mid Autumn Festival here in Xiamen! Playing a gambling game, drinking tea, eating moon cakes and spending time with one’s family to watch the moon generally celebrate this holiday. (Or so I was told) We were able to go out to Zhongshan Lu again to people watch and it was curious to not find anyone playing the gambling game, nor were many people eating moon cakes. Though when we went a few days before they were all about doing those things. I am quite curious as to why people weren’t doing such things on the actual holiday. I was also under the impression that many of the younger people, mainly college age people, would use this opportunity (no school) to go out and enjoy themselves at a bar or something similar to one like a party. The people that we did see seemed to definitely be celebrating (making toasts, laughing and eating) but it didn’t seem like people were acting any differently than they normally would. Is this holiday more of a resting holiday? One in which people are able to just relax from work or school?
Another thing I noticed is that there were definitely more people on the street selling various things, that clearly did not relate to the holiday, (why was nobody selling moon cakes?) but I imagine that they maybe assume that students and other people maybe have more time to go out if they are able to take time off work and school for the holiday. When I tried to buy a few things these people were also really unwilling to bargain, which is seriously unusual from the other street vendors I have encountered here. I even tried the “walking away” trick but to no avail. I wonder if in Xiamen the bargaining is different from people in Shanghai or Beijing- maybe people in the city are more desperate for money than people here are. It seems that everyday commodities are definitely cheaper here, but I’m not sure if it actually makes that big of a difference.
Earlier in the night when we went to go eat dinner one of our friends said that the restaurant we were going to didn’t have any drinks so we decided to buy a few before we went inside. But obviously we were not thinking clearly because we bought beers, and the restaurant we were going to was a Muslim restaurant! What were we thinking? It was funny though how the man explained to us that we couldn’t bring the beers inside. He pointed to his head covering and just said “Muslim…no beer.” Then he encouraged us to finish our beers quickly so that we could still eat at the restaurant- but we figured that would be pointless because if we did we would loose our appetite and that’s never fun. So we ended up going to another restaurant, but I just found it so funny how nice they were about the whole situation. I’ve found that a lot of religions in the U.S. are not particularly tolerant of people who do not follow their rules- but these guys were so nice about it. I wonder if that has much to do with just the Muslim culture, Chinese culture or a mixture of the two?
All in all though I think the group had a pretty good experience of ZhongQiuJie (the Mid-autumn festival) and it makes me very curious as to how people celebrate the spring festival, considering some of our conversation partners said that it was when most Chinese celebrate the most.
