Same Moon Night

As promised in my previous post. Here’s the first of three updates planned for this week, so let’s get started shall we?

It was on friday when I got back from class that I met one of my neighbours in the hallway on the fourth floor of dorm 23 where I live. We had some small talk about what we did that day when he asked me what I was planning to do on monday the 24th. I hadn’t planned anything yet so I told I had nothing to do. He asked is I was interested to go to some kind of cultural thing with other foreign students. I wanted to know more before confirming so he told me that foreign students from Tsinghua were invited to experience somekind of cultural event which involved visiting a acrobatic performance and free food and stuff. He told me my roommate and Juan were also going so I told him to sign me up or this event. That was al he knew about the evet. Fast forward to monday ….

On monday me and my friends went to the meeting point, got a program of the event (in Chinese, which I couldn’t read) and we waited for the bus with the other foreign students from Tsinghua. We went to a acrobat show, we were a little bit late because of traffic but we still were able to see quite a few perfomances. Take a look at the pictures in the picture gallery and the movies on youtube.

Pictures Same Moon Night
Movies Same Moon Night

After the acrobatic performances we went to a temple to have food, at least that was what we were all thinking in the bus. What we thought was going to be a dinner was actually a show with snacks and a lottery. We heard that the event was organized by the government of the Chaoyang district and was to promote the Chinese culture to foreign people. The hosts for the evening spoke about exchanging culture etc and named the country that the foreign people were from. I was quite surprised to hear my own country Hélán in Chinese and Holland in English from the hosts in the short list of countries they pronounced.

Anyway, there were some traditional performances of different areas in China and in between performances there was a lottery with nice prices. When we got at the temple we had to write our names in the guestbook and we received a lottery ticket. The prizes you could win were: USB sticks, mp3 & video players, navigation devices, digital camera’s and the main price was a digital filmcamera. The weirdest thing happened during the first draw, the price was one of 60 USB sticks. Almost everyone from Tsinghua won a USB stick of 2GB from Kongston. It was really funny to see just about everyone from the 3 Tsinghua tables stand up and walk to the table were you could pick up the prizes. We had fun and on the way back I met some people that are living in my dorm but on different floors and a few that speak my dialect. Hakka pride. 😉 We made a promotional picture for Kingston with a part of the group, exchanged numbers and went to our rooms. It was a cool experience and I met some nice people. All in all it was a nice day.

The next day was mooncake festival and I spent that with my EUR friends. It was fun to see how the Mooncake festival is celebrated in China. It is way different that what we do at home. We just eat Mooncake and that’s about it. Here people actually meet and to stuff. On campus large groups were sitting in circles and telling stories, singing, playing games and what not. It was a new experience and somthing that I won’t be forgetting soon. Anyway, that’s me story about Same Moon Night.