Moon Cake Mania

In fact I was intended to post something about this a bit earlier but too many things came in between, some minor health problems etc. Anyway I do not want to bore anyone with this any further.

I would like to write about the Mid Autumn Festival in China and of course about the moon cakes. For the ones, who haven't seen or tried one yet, this is a very popular food in China (not sure, how old its tradition really is, though), their size is usually the size of one's hand and the weight of a normal sized cake is about 1 kg (!!!). Needless to say, it takes weeks (if not months) to digest (no wonder the Chinese usually eat very little and still survive).


The whole month you see trucks delivering loads of these things everywhere. The picture above was taken in front of a sea foon restaurant in Guangzhou, one of many deliveries that month. On the side of the truck, there are pictures of the cakes, I tried to describe above.

I work for a European company, who buys a lot in China. Every time for almost every single order we place to our suppliers, I face so many problems, which, almost without exception, delays the delivery or creates some other big problem and causes headache. However seeing these trucks everywhere and watching people eat (I have only tried it once and that was the last time, from then on I am only "seeing others eating" them), I am wondering how can these people, who have the potential to make so many things wrong, so many things, which you won´t even be able to imagine, manage to supply these so efficiently, that almost everyone you can see (and that means a lot of people in China) gets at least one of these.

The fact that these things are not consumed off season (after the Mid Autumn Festival) makes this phenomenon even more fascinating for me...

It is also quite obvious that this means very big business for some people, if you can imagine that a whole huge country like China, with almost everybody living in it (maybe except some minorities) demanding it. This was the topic of one of the recent Economist articles.

Chinglish

There are many blogs written about China, probably also written about Chinglish...

We all use phrases like "long time no see" but what I would like to post about is a special form of Chinglish, that, from my point of view, requires special attention.





I took the picture above in front of the Liu Hua Park in Guangzhou. Ever since I have been wondering about the meaning of "commutation ticket"...




Spilt... Obviously a typo, but how about to be "amerced within range of 20 to 50 yuan"?....

I will keep sharing the chinglish phrases, puzzling me.