Fire Dragon

Feels like something has been happening in the cities that I've traveled to recently. My evening in HK, coincidentally during a holiday was magical, but somehow the below post was attached to the bottom of a Mexico City post.  So I'm re-posting.
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 I was in Hong Kong during the mid-Autumn moon festival.  The famous August 15 (bot yert, sup em as my Grandmother would say).  I never really knew why we celebrated this, other than to eat moon cakes, but I was lucky enough to be in HK during this festival.

 

My co-worker took me to see the dragon.  It was hot and muggy and we waited for what seemed like forever.  It was well worth it.  What is a fire dragon, what is a fire dragon?  Is it different from the dragons I grew up with?  Dong cheng, dong cheng, dong cheng dong cheng dong cheng.  We would sing this as we brought the folding chairs out for dinner with my uncles.  It was probably Sing Sok that taught us how to sing this, pretending we were in a parade, holding the chairs up.

Ughh--where is it, I'm sick of waiting.  We all smell herng (the incense, oh it must be coming).  I was next to two men, probably 10 years older than  me with big camera's.  A ha!  I can understand their Cantonese.  Here it comes, we can all smell the herng.

Basically, it was a normal dragon--unusually long, with what must have been thousands of lit incense on top of them.  It danced around, up and down the street which was SOOOO crowded.  Reminded me of our own Chinese New Year's on Mott Street.  People climbing on gates and street lights to get a better look.  Cops telling them to get down.
I loved it.  Was lucky to be there on that day.  After that we walked to Victoria Park and saw all the lights, lanterns and FULL MOON.  The true meaning of bot yert, sup em!