Zhongqiu jie kuaile!

Which means: Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

Because that's what today is. This morning, a beautiful moon gazed down on our balcony breakfast, and our local temple/monastery was all lit up. (I know we've had shots of the illuminated temple twice before, but the new camera does it so much better...)



Mid-Autumn Festival is not a public holiday in Malaysia, but many schools seemed to be closed or quiet, and a few of the normally bustling places on Jalan Padungan seemed to be planning either not to open or to do it after a bit of a lie-in.

The festival is probably best known for bringing us mooncakes, and every year we've spent in Malaysia, I've talked about these auspicious and delectable pastries: 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019.

This year we decided to stay local for our mooncake supplies, and bought three different kinds from this place on Jalan Padungan:



You see the lady on the cloud? Well, she's at the heart of the Mid-Autumn Festival story:

Once upon a time there was a talented archer called Hou Yi, who had a wife named Chang'e. There was a bit of a surfeit of suns in those days (10, to be precise), and their combined heat was burning up the earth, and causing people to die.

So Hou Yi, with his trusty bow and arrows, shot down nine of them. As a reward he was given an elixir that could make him immortal.

The snag, though, was there was only enough for one person, and Hou Yi didn't want to outlive Chang'e. So he didn't swallow it, and gave it to her for safe-keeping instead.

One of Hou Yi's students, Pang Meng, waited until the archer was off on a hunting expedition, and then tried to force Chang'e to hand over the elixir. Realizing that she couldn't overpower him, she drank the famous substance herself.

She floated up, up, up, and eventually came to rest on the moon.

Of course, this was terrible news for Hou Yi, who began the practice of offering food to the moon, in the hope that Chang'e could one day come back.

Up there with Chang'e lives a jade rabbit. But that's another story...

Anyway, here's our initial trio of mooncakes, all excellent:




That was supposed to be it, but then we were seduced by the "home-made mooncakes" sign at the Fu Hua Cafe, at which we occasionally stop by when our craving for mee sua becomes overwhelming.

Also a very fine mooncake:



There have been a couple of other notable dates recently. The first was the Autumn Equinox, which happened at 21.30 on Tuesday 22 September, but we were so busy with the first day of our road trip that we didn't find out until afterwards.

And on Thursday 24 September, we began the transition from the southwest monsoon to the northeast monsoon. This transition phase is expected to last until early November, at which point we'll move into the full-on rainy season. This would normally last until March. Then we'll get another transitional period, heralding the shift from the northeast to the southwest monsoon. By May, the transition would normally be over, and the hot and dry season upon us.

All these momentous shifts seemed to demand a celebration of some description, so on Saturday evening we cracked open a bottle of red, and I made my first Kuching pizza (previously not possible because you really need a microwave to melt the mozzarella and cream cheese that forms the basis of the dough). For a change, I made a "white pizza", with a topping of onion, garlic, olive oil, cream cheese, and Parmesan. Really nice...


These seasonal changes historically determined trading and settlement patterns in Southeast Asia.

More immediately, the transition seems to be bringing a LOT of rain.



And finally, some images of our strange times: