Home for the holidays
Posted by tthu on February 8th, 2010 filed in MatthewChinese New Year is fast approaching. When I first came to Korea in 2005, I was excited at the prospect of being in Asia during a holiday that doesn’t get much coverage in Australia. At that time I was quite disappointed at the turn-out. In Korea, it’s pretty much the quietest time of the year. Everyone goes home to their families, shops close, the streets are empty.
It’s looking like China might turn out to be a similar event. All the students we have met so far have now gone home for the holidays. Some of them have been ‘forced’ to by their parents. The busses are emptier than we’ve seen them, lots of shops are keeping their doors closed and there is still several days to go before the holiday actually starts!
Originally Cathryn and I were going to look at spending some time with my friend Steve and his family in either Taiwan or Japan. However a side-effect of the national holiday is that plane fares triple in price. So it was ridiculously expensive to even contemplate leaving the country at this time. I guess we can spend some time via Skype if we need to.
I’m hoping that something exciting will happen during the next week and a half. Otherwise we might be having a quiet week indoors.
February 11th, 2010 at 07:22
The first few days of Chinese New Year usually quite quiet, but by the end of the week, most business will start trading and when they start, they will put on a “red fire crackers” in front of their trading doors… and it is going to be noisy!!! It happened to Macao when I was there, I assume Mainland China is the same. Fire crackers is illegal in HK thought.
February 11th, 2010 at 11:37
That could be stressful. When I’d been to Taiyuan 2 years ago, my wife had suffered from empty shops, even E-mart or Homeplus. She remembers eating a cup ramen at a convenience store. It was terrible here, too.
Let’s meet in Skype.
February 12th, 2010 at 13:49
These days we visit daily the shop where our friend works.
On the street where his office is, there are at least 8 temporary stalls set up selling fireworks!! Each one is only about 100-200m from the next one.