Moon Festival

This weekend was the Moon Festival in Taiwan (you can just make out the full moon in the picture below). A Taiwanese/Austrian friend invited me and several classmates to a traditional barbecue at his 8th floor apartment (hence the nice views).



The food was awesome, all carefully prepared beforehand by our gracious host: rice sausage, pork strips, leeks wrapped with beef, marinated/grilled tofu, kebabs, chunks of fish(not sure of species). The dishes were small, but numerous, and arrived in rapid succession. Every 3 or 4, I did a slow lap around the balcony (making more room in my stomach).



To assure that nothing went to waste, we played a game, Taiwanese I think, where the first person calls off "hunter", the second "duck", then "boom", "ahh!"....and then "hunter", "hunter", "duck", "duck", "boom", "boom", "ahh!", "ahh!". This gets difficult very quickly(would make a great drinking game), and the loser must eat some part of the left-overs.

After dinner, another Taiwanese gentleman (studying materials physics at Feng-Chia, attached to japanese class-mate of mine) explained to everyone that one could tell whether you are Han(the dominant ethnic group in China [19% of humanity]) or Qing(minority group, originally Manchurian, conquered the Ming dynasty in 17th century to found Qing) simply by looking at your pinky toe. So he went around to all the locals, inspecting their pinky toes, testing his theory.

(All of this made very surreal by background radio station playing Justin Timberlake.)





And one for sanam: