A Walk Around Town on New Year's Eve

 New Year's Eve, by the lunar calendar, fell on Sunday, January 22.  With the coming of midnight, and New Year's Day, the year of the Rabbit would end and the year of the Dragon would begin.  It was not a very pretty day in Suzhou.  The skies were grey and it drizzled rain the entire day.  But it was tolerable enough to take a walk around town.

 The New Year's Holiday is a big deal.  It is the most significant holiday of the year, by far, in China.  It's tempting to compare it to the Christmas season, because there are a lot of similarities.  It is a time of family gatherings and gift giving and special foods.  And just as Christmas traditions vary from country to to country, so too do the New Year traditions vary between the regions of China.  But the analogy to Christmas only goes so far.  The Lunar New Year share similarities with Christmas, but it is not the same.

Tradition demands that the New Year holiday be spent with family.  Family means extended family....including grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.  In the old days, the New Year gatherings would be huge family reunions.  These days, due to the one-child policies, there are fewer aunts and uncles and cousins.   But still, the expectation is that everyone get together beginning on New Year's eve.  For several days the families gather and they eat the special holiday foods and they play cards and mah jong and they honor the memories of those no longer living.

They also shoot off a lot of fireworks.  But that is another story.

The mandate to spend the holiday with family, more than any other factor, determines the character of the holiday.  The New Year holiday is a time of travel nightmares. In the week before new year,  1 billion people strain the roads and the railways and the airports to the breaking point.  And a week later they strain it all again when they return home.   In the old days, China was mostly farming communities in which families could reunite by walking a few blocks within a village.  In these days of urbanization, people flee the large cities to return to their ancestral homes.  Or they pick a neutral tourist location for all the family to gather.  

Regardless, the travel statistics are stupefying.  The airports are clogged by tens of millions of travellers, much like the U.S. airports at Thanksgiving.  But by far, the biggest portion of people travel in China by train.  Imagine if one day, the entire population of the U.S. woke up, ate breakfast, and then all went to the local train station.  That is what it is like.  Over 300 million people travelling by train.  A few hundred million more travel by car and by bus.

I'd heard horror stories about train travel.   Train tickets go on sale two weeks before scheduled departure.  They open up 30 extra ticket windows for the holiday, but people still end up waiting in line for two days to buy train tickets.  I went to the Suzhou railway station on the after noon of New Year's Eve and found it to be much less dramatic.  As the second photo shows, the railway station was crowded....but not much more so than on a normal day. 

One possible explanation for the relative calm at the railway station; this was the first year that the China Railway System provided an on-line option for booking tickets.  The newspapers said that, during the week before the holiday, the on-line ticket booking web sites were getting over 1 billion hits per day.

 In Suzhou on New Year's Eve, things were relatively calm.  Relatively dead is perhaps a more accurate description.  Since Suzhou has grown rapidly in the last 20 years, it means that most of the people are from someplace else.  Most of those people had gone back to someplace else....and the town was comparatively deserted when I took my walk around Suzhou.

A lot of the doorways were decorated for the holiday.  The Chinese doorway decoration is not like those we saw in Japan.  In China, the typical decoration is as set of three banners that frame the doorway - a vertical banner on each of the left and right door jambs and a horizontal banner across the top.  The banners are inscribed with a poem or a good-luck saying.  They are almost always written in gold letters on a red background, as shown by the photo above.  Red and gold are auspicious colors.

 Food is a big part of the New Year's Eve celebration.  My understanding is that people sit down together for a big meal, and then graze for another 6 or 7 hours as they wait for midnight to come.  I stopped by the Auchan Supermarket to get some things and it was crazy with last minute shoppers filling out their menus.  The Auchan in Suzhou is the largest supermarket I've ever seen in my life.  It has 110 check out registers, and all 110 were being used.  The people were 5 or 6 deep at each one.  I swear there were 20,000 people in that store.  At least that many.  I kid you not.

The photo above shows a lady who had already gotten her shopping out of the way.  I found her on a side street in the old city, drawing water from a well to wash her vegetables.

 Not everyone in Suzhou was on the ball for the holiday.  The photo above shows a doorway for which the owner needs a wake-up call.  Not only is the "Merry Christmas" decoration over a month old, but the rabbit decorations are a year off.  2011 is the year of the rabbit.  2012 is the year of the Dragon.

Finally, the photo above has nothing to do with the holiday.  But I thought it was interesting.  The photo shows how the horizontal surfaces of an apartment have been fitted out with broken glass to discourage climbers.  The use of broken glass is not unusual - you see it all over Suzhou (and other countries) to top off walls.  It is a cheap substitute for razor wire.  But the owner of this apartment is clever.  He has set full sheets of glass in the top of the wall.  They serve as both deterrent and as a burglar alarm.  No one can climb on top of this wall without causing the full panes of glass to break off and shatter noisily.  And of course, after breaking, the panes of glass will leave some nasty shards for any burglar to climb over.