Mid Autumn Lantern Festival @Victoria Park HK

The main official Hong Kong festivities were held at Victoria Park between Causeway Bay and Tin Hau MTR stations. The event ran for a few days, including large lanterns and a few local Chinese culture stages with Cantonese opera, Chinese puppet shows, acrobatics etc.

I went down there with a few exchange students from HKUST, had a very local dinner nearby and dessert at an ice-cream place, then made our way to Victoria Park to watch the lanterns and Chinese shows.

East Asian Games 2009 are heavily promoted across HK, and the two symbols make an annoying appearance in almost every HK government arranged event.

The part I liked the most were the very original Chinese puppet plays.

Those puppet shows are not as straight forward as you might think they are. The coolest one I saw till this visit in Victoria Park was back in Tainan-Taiwan were the puppet were shooting around fireworks while doing highly sophisticated dances. One of the puppet shows here came close. The one I captured had some other interesting feature of puppet acrobatics, whirling around plates and other funny moves you wouldn’t expect from a puppet show.

Naturally, there was also the usual crazy Kung Fu dancing…

More from the blogosphere on the event :

• Mid-autumn festival lanterns in Hong Kong (photo-essay)
• Happy Mid-Autumn Festival
• Dragon Dance
• A Day Off, and the Mid-Autumn Festival
• Mid Autumn Festival Part 2 – This Little Light of Mine
• Mid-Autumn Festival Lanterns

BTW – I really like the street between the CWB MTR station and Sogo that has a huge variety of local eateries. I strongly recommend trying those out instead of just heading straight for chains and upmarket restaurants. Gives you a flavour of local life, the closest I can get to the wonderful Taiwan street food experience.