To welcome us, and to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival (called the August Moon Festival in the U.S. and celebrated on the full moon of the 8th *lunar* month in China, September 12th this year), the waiban took the other American teachers, the one Japanese teacher, and John, and I out to a banquet dinner. (A side note about the Japanese teacher: He has taught Japanese here every fall semester since 1995. He speaks Chinese, but with an accent I find hard to understand. Because she doesn't speak Mandarin, his wife stays behind in Japan. He is over 70 years old, and was part of the Japanese invasion of Shanghai during WWII. As part of a personal sense of reparation, he accepts no salary from the college.)

The Chinese seem to dine early. A mini van picked us up at 5:30 to take us to one of the expensive hotels downtown.

We sat a huge round table. I'm not sure if the orange tablecloth was supposed to allude to the golden autumn moon or if we would find the same color in spring. In China, a place setting consists of a small bowl with a porcelain soup spoon resting in it, chopsticks (in fancier restaurants there is also a thing on which you rest your chopsticks), and a teacup on a small saucer. In pricey restaurants, the teacup has a lid. In more modest places, you get a glass of tea instead of a teacup. In lieu of napkins, each person gets a purse-sized packet of kleenex. It seems to be standard practice to take the rest of the kleenex with you when you leave since that is exactly what people use for toilet paper in public restrooms. We have seen a few places where a roll of toilet paper in a plastic dispenser takes the place of kleenex packets, but never at a place so nice as where our banquet occurred.

Food is served on platters on a lazy-susan in the middle of the table. You reach in with your chopsticks to take a mouthful of what pleases you. At a banquet like ours, rice is not served until the very end because it is (correctly) assumed that you will fill up on far more delicious things. Even in ordinary restaurants in Bailongsi, there is still a tendency not to serve the rice until you're practically finished eating. I always have to ask at some point for them to bring it *now*.

Throughout the meal, we drank Eight Treasures Tea; of these treasures, I can only name chrysanthemum, jujube, and wolf berry. It's not clear to me whether there are actually any tea leaves in it. Anyway, it is delicious--slightly sweet and spicy-- and improves the more it sits. At this particular restaurant, the affectation equivalent of the 3-foot long pepper mill you sometimes see in American restaurants was what appeared to be a copper watering can with a very narrow spout that had to be 4 feet long. From this absurd vessel, our tea was replenished! We have since learned that this kind of pot was standard equipment in traditional teahouses.

I lost count of the dishes, but here's what I remember: lotus hearts, fried local goat cheese ( a great favorite--we ended up reordering that one), stewed eggplant, an unfamiliar but delicious tofu dish, eggs scrambled with tomatoes, several different sauteed greens dishes, pork & mushrooms, asparagus, an expensive local mushroom that is very crinkly and must be peeled entirely before it can be eaten (yum!), a sweet lemony soup with egg white froth on top, whole shrimp, a whole fish, eel, buckwheat pancakes, cornmeal pancakes, a potato pancake a la eastern Europe, and for the kids present, frozen vanilla yogurt. Only the men, including Mr. Goodman, were served thimble-sized glasses of baijiu (grain alcohol) which were drank as shots for a series of toasts.

Women could toast with beer or juice. Mr Goodman survived. (It took very little urging for the waiban to call me "Deborah," but they persist in calling John "Mr. Goodman," no doubt because of his extraordinarily advanced age.) It seems that after the first toast, it's okay not to down your whole glass; in fact, you can even toast with beer. At this point, we have had several truly excellent meals in China, but I think this one definitely was the champion. I don't know how we will ever tolerate Chinese food in the U.S. when we return.

At the end, they gave each couple a beautiful shopping bag containing a tin of moon cakes for the holiday. Our's, we were assured, were made with vegetable shortening. They seem to take our vegetarianism seriously. If I read the sticker on the tin correctly, we also got the low-calorie version, but it wasn't exactly something Weight Watcher's will be approving any time soon. As far as Chinese desserts go, these moon cakes were not bad. They were cakes about 3 inches in diameter and almost 2 inches high. Ours had a thin and fairly greasy pastry covering a tasty bean paste filling around less tasty whole chestnuts.

On Zhongqiujie (Mid-Autumn Festival) proper, the streets and market were bustling. One thing I really like about the way the Chinese celebrate holidays is the very public orientation. In the United States, if you go outside on Christmas or Thanksgiving, it looks like a neutron bomb had gone off. When we lived in East Cambridge, where the Portuguese took Easter seriously, the streets were empty on that holiday too. Anyway, everyone is outdoors on Chinese holidays and markets stock new and unusual delicacies. For instance, in the Bailongsi market, in addition to live ducks and eels which don't show up everyday, we saw for the first time honeybee (maybe wasp?) larva, which I confirmed, are indeed for consumption. Lots of people were carrying home a doomed upside-down chicken.

That evening, John and I biked downtown to the vegetarian restaurant across from Kunming's biggest Buddhist temple. This is our expensive restaurant of choice, but a large meal with beer still comes to less than US$4. Because nothing contains meat and they have an English menu, we get adventurous there. For example, we tried wild rice stem with pine nuts, and if you have the chance to try it, I'd recommend it.

Then we continued a few blocks down to an especially attractive park which I will tell you about in greater detail in a future WDTW. It was just like First Night in Boston, minus the frostbite or admission fees. Everyone was wandering about or sitting and eating moon cakes with tea. Lots of children held bobbing candle-lit paper lanterns which looked charming in an incredibly dangerous way. (We didn't actually see any ignite.) Some of the former temple structures in the park had Christmas lights among the roofs, all of which were reflected in the many ponds. It was too cloudy to see the moon, but everyone was jubilant nonetheless.

As it happens, when we had biked home and were just entering our building, the moon emerged. It wasn't a huge golden moon of the kind this holiday celebrates, but it was our first full moon in Kunming, and we went to bed content.

Our next big banquet will take place this coming Friday. The governor of Yunnan Province is hosting a dinner (preceded by two hours of speeches) for all the foreign experts in the province. We are looking forward to some fabulous food, although there, no one will have taken vegetarianism into consideration when designing the menu.

The next day we begin our one-week vacation in honor of China's October 1st National Day. John and I are heading up to Lijiang. Get out your maps: it's closer to Tibet and Sichuan. Scenery should be spectacular. Surely John will post photos on his homepage when we return.