Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Moon Cakes and Eggs

Its that time of year again, Moon Day is approaching, excuse me, Mid-Autumn Festival. Moon Day just sounds more fun to me. The holiday isn't actually until the first week of October this year, but the grocery store is overflowing with Moon Cakes of all varieties, most of which seem to have some type of meat involved. Yuck. Although this year I have noticed ads from Starbucks, Hagen Daaz and DQ that show more delicious looking ones involving ice cream and chocolate. Unfortunately these also seem to be priced way out of my price range, as in 500RMB for 4 tiny individual cakes - that's about $72. Yikes.

In other grocery store hilarity, it never ceases to amaze me what lengths Chinese people will go to to save a buck. Apparently if you go to the grocery store in the early morning eggs are on sale. Now being from the US, I'm used to buying eggs in cartons that are stored in a refrigerated case. Not so in China. Eggs are stored on the shelf and the ones that go on sale are purchased out of a big bin and placed into an impossibly thin plastic bag. I have then seen people take said plastic bag, filled with at least two dozen loose eggs mind you, in their hands and get on an electric bike to go home. Disaster waiting to happen if you ask me. I always buy my eggs in the carton even though I'm sure its twice as expensive, just so I don't break them all before I even leave the store. Not to mention, I would never wait in line as long as some of these people seem to just to save a few kui. I guess I'm an egg snob.

Mooncakes by the truckload.

The egg line.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

So they will wait patiently in line to save a few bucks on eggs and yet every other "wait in line" scenario gets thrown out the window as they all rush and scrunch and push and shove to get what they want? Wild. I wonder what things we do that seem crazy to other cultures.