MIDAUTUMN LANTERN FESTIVAL AT CHINESE GARDENS

Midautumn Festival or what we call here in Singapore 'Mooncake Festival' or 'Lantern Festival' (different from the Chinese new year's Lantern festival btw). It is a kind of harvest festival in China but we don't harvest anything here in Singapore so we just celebrate it for the sake of it being chinese and enjoy glowing things. We eat mooncakes which are round sweet pastries and play around with lanterns.

It landed on 12 Sept this year - that be the 15th day of the 8th month on the lunar calendar - so there was a full moon that night. I went to the Chinese Gardens to catch a glimpse of the lantern exhibits.

Those orange lions are actually part of the lantern show.

This is atop the 7 storey pagoda.

There was a haze that day from some forest fires from Indonesia , the weather was overcast, hot and extremely humid. It was quite unbearable, even at night. That bridge links to the Japanese gardens.

Looking down the pagoda stairs

Koi pond

This exhibit is part of the chinese zodiac series featuring the 12 animals. Well the lanterns were finally lit up!

Journey to the West characters - Sun Wukong the Monkey King, Pigsy Zhu Bajie & Monk Tang on the white dragon horse.

And Friar Sand Sha Wujing.

This Nezha exhibit was in the middle of a large pond.

The seven celestial fairy sisters.

This was also in the water, and the fish to the right spouts water.

This is based on chinese folklore - Hou Yi shooting down the nine suns to save the earth so that's why we have only one sun in the sky now.

The pagoda at night and the moon peeking. It actually rained and the clouds covered the moon completely but it came out just for a few minutes for me to take this photo.

Our paper lanterns.

Our sparklers, it started raining as we lit the first one up so we only managed  a few sticks. There was a fireworks show but I didn't take any photos!