Mooncakes!

From end of August and the beginning of September you can observe how suddenly long queues of people are being formed outside bakeries, and outside all the extra selling stalls with huge piles of Cardboard bokses, which suddenly has been built up in all shopping centers, and you might be hit by this sudden idea, that you've forgotten something, like a long holiday was supposed to come up and everybody desperately need supplies for weeks. Now; from the bakeries and the temporary selling stalls, they all come out carrying small and nicely decorated coloured paper bags along with all the other bags from their extended shopping trips. In these nice paper bags, you can see some very nice decorated and very colourful tin bokses; that is the "Mooncakes" they are bringing home for the coming Mid Autumn Festival. This festival is one of the most important holidays in the Chinese calendar, and is held on the 15th day of the 8th Lunar month -which is now this weekend- and is held to celebrate the end of the summer harvest season. Families and friends gather together on this night and eat the mooncakes and pomelos under the the open sky, and the moon. Mooncake is a very rich and quite heavy pastry, with a thick crust and various fillings like Lotus seed paste, sweet bean paste and then added dried fruit, nuts and some sorts even contains the yolk of a salted duck egg, hid in the middle of all the sweet paste, fruits and nuts like a little surprise. After the Mid Autumn festival, you can find hundreds of empty mooncake bokses at the trash collecting points. I thought they might collect them all again, to be useed again next year, but no; on the nice ornamented and coloured surface the year is pressed into the tin like a stamp. So last year I collected some of those bokses to store some small things inside, as they are very beautiful, solid, practical and easy to pile up, and that is very good for people like us, who move to different places every now and then.