Bo Gong, Mooncakes and all that

Caroline is currently having an afternoon nap.
Plenty of sleep to catch up on after arriving on Monday afternoon and starting work Tuesday morning.

A busy day yesterday spent apartment reviewing in the morning and teaching in the afternoon. We saw some great flats, but it's going to take at least one more viewing session before we can settle on one for sure. Some crackers though. If you didn't see the photographs, check out my earlier posts.

So this is quite a short post as work and real life kicks in and there's less time for bloggable activities.

A couple of nights ago, after Caroline had been working late (already, see the need for the nap) we were intrigued by the view from our window:
So, you can see it's the Bo Gong Restaurant, but what does that mean in practice?
Well another blogger described it like this.
Personally I would say that 250Y for the bottom half of a chicken and some cold spinach and clams was a bit steep, maybe we are just harder to please than the Swiss.

It doesn't help that after class yesterday, Caroline and I went for dinner near the university which was delicious and came to the ridiculous price of 40Y. Where we currently live is not too healthy on the wallet, well not compared to the rest of the city anyway. However, there's bound to be good and bad experiences as we find our feet. Oh, look, there they are, covered in blue plastic bags:

Tomorrow is Mid-Autumn Festival here. It seems to very roughly equate to harvest festival, without the need to take old tins of beans in to school (apologies to the Germans, this is a curious British tradition I can't seem to reasonably explain).

In order to try and integrate ourselves, Caroline and I have been trying out different kinds of mooncakes:
An entertaining story about these is that during the Yuan (Mongolian) Dynasty, group meetings were banned to prevent the ferment of rebellion. Noting their Mongol rulers didn't eat mooncakes, leaders of the rebel alliance concealed messages in thousands of Mooncakes to "Rise up and kill the Mongols on the 15th day of the 8th moon" they then asked for permission to distribute the cakes to the Chinese populace. All went according to plan, just like the A-Team, the Yuan were overthrown and the establishment of the Mingers.
A good story doesn't even have to be true.

Anyway, that's us up-to-date, I'm going to go and disturb Caroline and see if she fancies some duck for dinner.