Bun Festival!

So as a replacement for Slope Day this year, I went to a Bun Festival held on a Cheung Cheu island. It was a great replacement! This is a small island about 30 minutes away from Hong Kong Island (on a fast ferry, an hour on the slow one) where no cars are allowed, nice beaches, the windsurfing capital of Hong Kong (apparently, Hong Kong's one and only olympic gold medal came from a windsurfer who trained here). And each year, lots of people swarm the island for their Bun Festival!

The Bun Festival obviously involves lots of buns. The buns are pretty big with a big red mark on the top for the baker and are filled with various sweet fillings (meaning red bean paste, sesame paste or an egg yoke custard). But the real attraction for the buns are the 40 foot towers covered them! At around 11 PM, people race to the top and try to pick as many buns off the tower as they can. About 30 years ago, the bun tower collapsed so the bun tower climbing was canceled. It was only reinstated in 2005, but with steel instead of bamboo supporting the towers and using plastic buns instead of real ones. They still make 3 huge towers and many small towers out of real buns though! They also build these paper effigies of the gods and people set up these picnics for the gods to come eat at. People go around to all the picnics that are seat up (probably 30 of them) and add more offerings and foods for the gods. They then burn the paper gods.

Also accompanying the festival is a parade featuring lots of chinese lions and dragons, marching bands of chinese instruments, and little kids in heavy makeup 10 feet in the air, supported only by thin polls! I also caught a little chinese opera.

For dinner, we had this great seafood dinner. I don't even really at fish or seafood and this was good! And so cheap. Less than $10 USD for like 8 different courses. The buns were cheap too, less than a dollar for a bun that probably could suffice as a meal in itself.

I missed the bun scrambling part because I had to get back to campus, but I'm sure it was fun. Here are more pictures on facebook. (Note, I brought my nice camera but when I got there I discovered it was out of batteries. I was going to bring my small camera, but then I decided against it. So I was left with the phone on my camera, which soon ran out of batteries too....)