Dim Sum, Moon Cake, and Campus Police

9/28 --- This morning I woke up to meet Rong, and a few others for dim sum at a nice restaurant right here on campus.  dim sum is usually eaten around late morning/early afternoon, and it includes many different bite size foods served with tea.  All of the food was fantastic.  I wish I could have dim sum everyday.

Later that evening, after class, I went to a Mid-Autumn festival hosted by the language center.  There weren't many people there, and some of the stuff was pretty bizarre, like the chinese poetry, and learning to sing a chinese song(which was impossible).   We did however get to make chinese lanterns and eat yuè bĭng (moon cake).  Moon cake is quite good and its traditionally eaten during mid autumn festival, but supposedly its very fattening.  I doubt its any worse than eating a box of oreos or chocolate cake, or whatever else you can think of from the states.  My lantern turned out pretty bad, and everyone kept saying the guy playing guitar looked like a person riding a chicken.  Oh well, i'm no artist.

After returning to my room that evening, I ran into a few local students from my floor and they invited me to participate in some mid autumn festival tradition candle burning.  The plan was to burn these candles in a metal tin and create a large fire, and then dump water on it to cause an explosion of some sorts.  Sounds kinda lame, but I decided to join in to see what it was all about haha.  Its about midnight at this point, and we head up to the outdoor patio of LG7.  It was windy, so it was hard to keep the candles lit, but it seemed pretty safe to me.  The locals are mostly talking in cantonese but every once in a while I would hear english curse words.  They said that cursing in english is more classy haha.  So we're all huddled around this tin burning candles, and suddenly we're surrounded by campus police!  Everyone was just talking in cantonese so I didn't have a clue what was going on.  The police then took us to the security headquarters and sat us down and we were scolded by some old guy.  I still didn't really know what was going on, they took our names, but apparently it was just a warning.  They thought that the place we were burning candles was unsafe and a snake could have come up and bit us or something haha I don't really know.  For a second I thought i was gonna be sent back to the US for burning candles in Hong Kong.  Only three weeks here, and I'm already in trouble with the authorities.