Chung Yuan Festival (or Ghost Festival)

Today was also Taiwanese Father’s Day (“8″ is pronounced “Ba” in Mandarin), but it was overshadowed by Chung Yuan Festival, or Chost Festival. My mom prepared some simple banquet for the gate god and ghosts and placed it on the table prepared by the condo association. I was surprised that several packages of instant noodles were part of it; were the god and ghosts able to boil some ghost world water and cook those noodles?

Afterwards, we burned some ghost money and clothes for the god and ghosts, even though the condo association already warned people not to. It provided a truck to carry everyone’s ghost money and clothes to Mu Zha and burn it there. Well, you could only change people’s old habit so much.

P.S. As I was working on this blog, the power went out at 8:34pm and came back at 9:12pm. We heard 3 big explosions and saw the smoke coming out from the manhold. Mom and Dad got bored and went to bed early (they got up and continued watching TV as soon as the power came back); I was able to continue working on my blog due to Panasonic CF-W4’s long battery life (What else could I do?). I wonder if it’s typhoons related, since it had been raining pretty hard tonight. I hope that they won’t affect my flight…