Last Monday was the Mid-autumn festival. We participated in a small way by eating a lot of fruit and moon cakes and gazing at the moon while strolling around the campus of Inner Mongolia University. Here are some pictures.
This is the haul of fruit and other treats that we got from the morning vegetable market: persimmons, pomegranates, walnuts, green-skinned oranges, and grapes. The grapes have a vaguely concord-like flavor. The cookies, while not fruit per se, are sold by mass. We bought half a kilogram of cookies, which incidentally is the most common pricing unit here.
This is the collection of mooncakes we bought. Dan thought it was important to get a big fancy one, but Sarala wanted to try several flavors, so we got some small ones too: chestnut, pinenut & corn, black sesame, mung bean, and a mysterious flavor called “rose-and-hundred-fruit.”
This was our pre-mooncake lunch. The vat of yellowish stuff near the top of the photo is Mongolian cultured butter.
Here are a couple of close-ups of the cakes and their fillings. Here are the black sesame and the chestnut ones:
The big one had a fruitcake-like filling:
And finally, a couple of pictures of the moon: reflected in our window glass, and spied through a gap in the willow branches.
Happy fall!