Golden Week

 October 1 is the National Day of the People's Republic of China.  It commemoriates the founding of the PRC as a nation in 1949.  But more than that, it's also one of the two "golden weeks" in the Chinese holiday calendar.  (The other is Spring Festival a.k.a. Chinese New Year.)  Officially, it is a three-day holiday....from October 1 to 3.  But since October 1 and 2 are on a week-end, they give you October 4 and 5 off as compensation.  Then, they throw in Thursday October 6 and Friday October 7 to make it a full seven days of no work. (Hence the name "golden week")

The odd thing is that to make up for having Thursday and Friday off, you are then expected to work Saturday October 8 and Sunday October 9.  So the Golden Week is followed by a Manure Week of working 7 days in a row.  (They do that a lot in China....have you trade week-day holidays for week-end work.)

 Photos show some of the decorations that popped up for National Day.   To be honest, I'm not exactly sure that the item shown in top photo has anything to do with National Day.  But it appeared at the end of September so I'm assuming that it does.  Middle photo shows the flower display out in front of our apartment.  There were similar displays in front of other apartments and public buildings.  The flowers spell out 国庆节, the Chinese name for the holiday.

Photo above shows the entrace to our apartment decked out with a new set of paper lanterns.  They also turned on the fountains.  I was disappointed, though, that there were no massive fireworks displays.

Originally we thought that Golden Week might be a good time to travel.  All the locals advised against it, though.  Seems that many Chinese use the golden week for travel.  "Don't go to the Great Wall", they said, "because your pictures will only show a great wall of people."  "Don't go to Shanghai", they said, "you will starve waiting in the line for food at McDonald's".  So Theresa and I just stayed in Suzhou and enjoyed the relative peace and quiet. 

I'm glad we did.  I read in the paper that Shanghai counted and additional 6.5 million tourists in town for the week.  Beijing may have had double that.