Mid-Autumn Festival 3 October 2009 By Suet Yi Lee

For NUSAF, festivals and special holidays are more than anything excuses for a giant Singaporean-and-friends get-together where we meet new people, catch up with old friends, play lame but fun games, eat good food, and basically hang around in the lounge of some residential hall until the wee hours of the night. So that’s exactly what we did for our favorite traditional Chinese festival – the Mid-Autumn festival, also known as Mooncake Festival and Lantern Festival sometimes. These names are self-explanatory as to what we’re supposed to do on this day. I’m sure most of us remember going for our local CC’s MAF event (at least I did. Clementi CC was really happening) as little kids where we ran around with other little kids with our cheapskate paper lanterns and more importantly, got to play with candles and wax in a secret corner where our parents wouldn’t see us. Other traditional activities include eating pomelo (big ones), lion dances… you can read more about MAF on Wiki.

But I digress. NUSAF, being all grown-up, didn’t play with lanterns. Neither did we bask in the moonlight and admire the moon, for we were gathered in the basement of plex where we had an extravagant feast that consisted of Ariel’s mooncakes from Singapore and egg tarts, roast goose (duck? Chicken?) from Argyle. Food is always the best part of any NUSAF gathering.

We then played Mafia – sounds like such a boring game, I know, but believe me when you play it with us sneaky, competitive and overly-analytical Singaporeans, this game becomes tremendously exciting. With one game came the next, and some of us continued playing a super complicated but again, intellectually stimulating and addictive card game in Chinese that originated from China so I guess that concluded our list of traditional Chinese activities to do on a traditional Chinese festival. For the friends who joined us, we hope you enjoyed yourselves, and for those who weren’t there, you missed out! Also, perhaps we can take our MAF event next year outdoors. It would make Mafia very very exciting.