Mid Autumn Festival

This week Vietnam is celebrating the Mid Autumn Festival, the country's biggest holiday for children. The celebration is filled with many song and dance performances for children, fire breathing dragon dances and drum troupes (see video above) and lots of candy and moon pies (a special sweet cake filled with meat and eggs that is only available during this holiday -- sounds completely unappetizing as a dessert but I actually really liked it).

I had many opportunities to take part in the celebration from joining the Hope Center youth (I am really going to miss them when I leave!) at a community wide Mid Autumn party to tagging along with my translator and following her church's dragon crew around several Hue neighborhoods.

In a sense, the dragon troupes act in a similar way to trick-or-treaters on Halloween, except they are trying to receive money notes versus candy and they have to work a lot harder to actually obtain the money. Each dragon crew practices for about a month prior to the celebration learning the dances and drum beats, buying the costumes, etc.

Then, during the festival, each group dances around neighborhoods and performs for neighbors that offer them money. Yet, the neighbors don't make it as easy as simply opening the door and handing over the cash. Instead, most Vietnamese residents and businesses will try to hang money on a long pole or stick and dangle it from a second story window or from one of the highest points on their buildings. Next, the dragon crew will have to reach up and take the money using the actual dragon costume -- sometimes this is achieved via a ladder and other times, as was the case with the group that we were with, this involves about 10 or 15 guys making a stacked pyramid of sorts to reach the money.

Even though I was most likely the dragon crew's oldest "groupie", I had such a great time following my translator's church dragon crew around town, that we tagged along with them two nights in a row!

This whole experience was definitely a far cry from the well beaten tourist path, and that's what I loved most about it -- getting to live and breathe a vibrant, authentic Vietnamese celebration.