National Day is the designated date on which a country celebrates its nationhood. It is often marked as the day on which a state or territory achieved independence. Other countries designate dates based on a patron saint's day or significant historic occurrences.
Oct 1 is the national day of the People's Republic of China. Mainland China and its two special administrative regions _ Hong Kong and Macao _ mark the day with a public holiday. But whereas Hong Kong and Macao have one or two days public holiday, mainland China celebrates with a seven-day public celebration _ we call this "Golden Week".
Almost every Chinese person looks forward to Golden Week _ but they also have to contend with the headaches caused by this holiday.
The first one is that the seven-day holiday confuses our workday schedule. How can holidays affect workdays? By making people look at calendars and clocks? No, because the seven-day holiday is made up of two weekends and three workdays.
This year, Golden Week was from Oct 1-7. It included one weekend, but besides that, Sunday, Sept 29, and Saturday, Oct 12, were designated as workdays too.
However, we will have a confused calendar because of this situation. Work a whole week and then rest on Saturday (Sept 28), then work two days (Sept 29-30) to welcome Golden Week from Oct 1-7. After the holiday we have to work six days and only get a one-day weekend, and then finally we will start a new week from the next Monday and everything goes back to normal. Is this really the holiday we want?
Anyway, having a long holiday still makes us excited, and we often plan to travel or visit home. But there is another problem. There are different kinds of trains _ high-speed, express, rapid, direct, ordinary and so on _ to meet different needs. Almost all train ticket prices are cheaper than airfares and trains are safer than buses, so a considerable number of people travel by rail.
But how to buy a ticket? There are many ways _ we can go to the railway station, book online or make reservations by telephone.
But "how" does not mean the channel by which we buy tickets _ it means "how" in the sense of how to get a ticket since demand is so that it's a feat in itself to lay your hands on a reservation.
A big population leads to big demand. The number of train tickets is far less than the number of passengers. In the run-up to the holiday, buying a ticket becomes a top priority. I once tried to call the hotline the moment tickets went on sale. The call was disconnected and I repeatedly called 40 times. Even so, I was not able to buy a ticket.
Some people choose to book tickets online, and this requires special software. If not, it's impossible to log-in to the website the first time. When you finally log-in, you encounter a message on the screen: "sold out".
I have never tried to buy a ticket from a ticket booth since there are always so many people queuing up. When it is your turn, you invariably face the same situation _ sold out _ because some people queue up three or four hours before the booths open. Before the Chinese New Year holidays, a large number of people queue up overnight. Although the situation has improved somewhat, it is still very difficult to buy tickets.
Even if you are lucky enough to get a ticket, the large number of visitors means almost all tourist attractions are overwhelmed. During last year's Golden Week, almost 80,000 tourists visited the section of the Great Wall in Beijing every day. Even more terrifying was the Forbidden City, which was swarmed by 180,000 a day.
Despite planning our Golden Week break well in advance, our vacation was still far from perfect because of the sheer number of people. Everywhere is so crowded _ ren shan ren hai (people mountain people sea) as we say in Chinese _ that it is hard to enjoy the view. Not surprisingly, more and more people choose to spend their vacation at home.
Cui Yuchen is a Chinese journalist based in Bangkok on the FK exchange programme.