Happy Mid-Autumn Festival

It doesn't feel like mid-autumn (more like mid-summer to me), but that's what it's called. Anyway, I was browsing the internet and found that Chicago's moon festival/mid-autumn festival was happening, so Patrick and I took the commuter rail up north to check it out. Here are the notable bits, in the order that I observed them:

A) The web advertised the festival's features as "supercool mooncake" and "one frickin' giant moon."

1) Almost no one there was Chinese, apart from some of the performers and booth-workers. I guess the festival wasn't in Chinatown.

2) On stage, there were two girls engaged in a sword fight set to a loud, traditional Chinese song--techno remix.

3) The spring rolls and potstickers were kinda mushy.

4) We were only around for the last half hour, but we caught the grand finale: teenage lion-dancers, doing their thing first to a brief burst of cymbals and drums, then to the stereo accompaniment of "Lose Control" by Missy Elliot and Ciara. They ended with Mariah Carey's "Shake It Off" (though they didn't dance to that last song quite as vigorously).

5) There was no mooncake. Supercool or not. None, period.

If you could make your expectations of this event as low as possible, then add in a few random quirks, you would probably have a pretty good idea of what it was like. We only caught the last half hour, so maybe it was partly our fault. Anyway, we had a good time people-watching and walking by the lake by the light of the full harvest moon.

I didn't get any good moon festival pictures, so I did a web search for some. Couldn't find any. This led me to a Google Image Search for "san francisco," which turned up this awesome photograph from the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition, which took place in SF. It struck me that although I know all this stuff about Chicago's Columbian Exposition, I've never even heard of the Panama Pacific International, and I have no idea where this "Tower of Jewels," as it was called, stood in its day. The only structure that survives is the dome-thing at the Palace of Fine Arts. (Is the dome itself the Palace? If not, what is? See, this is the extent of my ignorance.) Pretty amazing.