Mid-Autumn Festival at Gardens by the Bay

by Rebecca

Mid Autumn Festival celebrates harvest and is focused on worship of the moon. Overtime this focus on the night, has morphed it into a lantern festival in some parts of Asia. We took the MRT to Gardens by the Bay to see their take on it.

First we had our feast. There's an element of the Thanksgiving to the festival, with gathering for the family dinner. We love the Food Court at the Gardens, "Satay at the Bay", so we ordered all our favorites from various stall:

  • Satay - We got 40 pieces of the narrow skewers of meat grilled over the open grill. We had 3 types: chicken, beef and mutton. I liked the mutton best.
  • Compressed rice - The white rice comes squished into cakes for eating with your hands.
  • Dumplings - Jonathan got his favorite Soup Dumplings. The soup is inside the dumpling. He grabbed another regular type of dumpling too.  
  • Roti prata with curry for dipping - No hawker stop is complete without us buying a stack of these flat breads hot off the grill. Ms.E shocked us by eating roti prata in addition to her dinner.
  • Ms.E even found herself a burger and fries among the stalls.  For $12 it was actually a good deal for a burger. She kindly shared around her fries as there was quite a wait for most of the food stall (20-30 minutes for the food to be cooked).
  • Dad appeared with frozen drinks to share - 1 pinapple and 2 of our favorite dragonfruit sour sop.
Jonathan telling Ms.I that she should only take 1 skewer at a time.
I had to take a picture to show Jonathan that Ms.E was actually eating the roti prata.

Night had fallen as we had eaten at the open air tables, so we headed off, completely stuffed, in the direction of the drums. Below are the highlights from our walk in the order of when we saw them. Pictures don't do this justice: The warm night air (around 30 C), the traditional chinese music in the background and surrounding us, the earthy smells of the gardens and water, the crowds, the changing lights. Many of the floats had elements of movement with what looked like rivers of moving lights.

We wandered through the dragon's coils. 
This exhibit was illustrating traditional puppetry. There were tons of these little scenes made with lanterns.
There were long swaths of hand painted lanterns, by all different levels of artists.
This is what you'll see, if you're in Garden by the Bay on a usual night. They're called Super Trees.

Part way through our wander, we emerged in the centre space under the Super Trees. It's here that festivals  and events are primarily set up. We were able to stand and watch some chinese theater. The big girls were thrilled with the dancers, and Ms.I seemed to like listening to the traditional instruments and singing here.

Each act was introduced to explain the story we were about to see, first in English and then in Chinese. They were all traditional stories about the moon. We saw three acts. The girls would have stayed a lot longer, but we hadn't even seen the lanterns on the water yet. Amazingly, both the Gardens and this Lantern event is totally free.

Watching chinese theater under the moon.
There were lanterns for each of the 12 animals of the lunar calendar.
The view from one of the bridges
These floating lanterns are based on Chinese Watercolour paintings.
These ones highlighted Martial Arts.
Looking at the last of the floating lanterns.

We sat for a few minutes before heading to the MRT station, to watch the super trees change colour in the background and talk about the different elements we saw on the the floats. I believe we will be making some lanterns at home in the days to come, and maybe on our next visit to the library we will pick up some books on the watercolour paintings.