..is this weekend which means a bank holiday weekend.. woohoo! Im celebrating by going to Beijing for the weekend where I intend to take some dazzling shots to share with you all... esp looking forward to seeing the birds nest stadium and the Great Wall!

Thought I would also share with you some background shizzle on the Mid Autumn festival, also known as the Moon festival or the lantern festival, held around mid sept, and mooncake is eaten (as well as ridiculous amounts of fruit!). Its a festival held for the living (In china there are a lot for the dead where offerings are made for the ancestors to receive and keep them in the afterlife).
Here is the officially explanation from wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Autumn_Festival)

This is the ideal time, when the moon is at its fullest and brightest, to celebrate the abundance of the summer's harvest. The traditional food of this festival is the mooncake, of which there are many different varieties.

The Mid-Autumn Festival is one of the two most important holidays in the Chinese calendar (the other being the Chinese Lunar New Year), and is a legal holiday in several countries. Farmers celebrate the end of the summer harvesting season on this date. Traditionally, on this day, Chinese family members and friends will gather to admire the bright mid-autumn harvest moon, and eat moon cakes and pomeloes together. Accompanying the celebration, there are additional cultural or regional customs, such as:

Eating moon cakes outside under the moon
Putting pomelo rinds on one's head
Carrying brightly lit lanterns
Burning incense in reverence to deities including Chang'e
Planting Mid-Autumn trees
Collecting dandelion leaves and distributing them evenly among family members
Lighting lanterns on towers
Fire Dragon Dances

Would like to add to this that mooncakes taste like a sweet pork pie with hard egg yolk in the middle. A lot of Chinese say that they find them too sweet but as a hard core cookie fanatic I find they could defo stretch to more sugar! They are also very dense and heavy and are a bit of a cardiac arrest in a tin !!

Look fwd to updating you on my trip.
Much love
Tx