ESL Blogs

Chinese Spring Festival is the biggest festival in a year in China. This year, the festival begin at Feb 9th.(two days left.)

According to the wikipedia, the "Year" pronounced as "Nian" in Chinese Pinyin, was a monster in ancient times in China. The monster appeared and broke into villages to hurt people at the end of a year. In the beginning, people didn't know how to prevent YEAR from entering, and then, at another end of a year, when Year appeared again, a burned bamboo (cracker) just blew up and the big noise scared Year away. From that time, firing crackers is getting to become a tradition when an end of a year is coming.

These years, because of the bad air pollution problem, the government has announced to limit firing crackers, but most of people think that that would decrease feelings of the festival than before. However, this year, sales of the cracker are dropped dramatically.

Beside the story of the monster Year and crackers, there're a lot of striking things in the Spring Festival.

One big problem of these is transportation. For example, there're 7 days for Chinese Spring Festival vacation. Everyone has his vacation begining at a same day. What do you realize now? Yes it is population. In China, we have about almost 1,500,000,000 people, and almost half of them are working or living in the eastern coastal areas, and 45% young people are working or studying other cities far from their hometown. Spring Festival means reunion, members of a family are used to go back to home, stay with family or some relatives. Therefore, chinese public transportation system must to meet its enormous challenge during this holiday. According to the statistics from NBS, last year, China railway system had carried more than 300,000,000 travellers from southern China to the north. several days later, almost the same number of people were carried from north to the south, because they need to back to their original life as before when holiday ends. Although government has been improving effects of our public transportation, there also are many people cannot have the ticket for backing home in time.

2yrs ago, I bought a nice car, Ford Focus. Recently, I just noticed that the amount of miles are only 6,600. My car is only used for carrying me and my wife back to my hometown during the Spring Festival. I really dont wanna queue in line through whole night just for buying two tickets back home. That's really a nightmare!

If you are interested in this, come on, welcome to China, and you are certainlly to get to understand why chinese people sometimes don't like to queue in line for sth. Resource are less, but population are keeping increas. That must drive you crazzzzzzzzy asap.

And I wouldn't like to scare you, every year, during Spring Festival, more than 100 people died in traffic accident only for 7 days.

Last year, government made a policy that all expressways are free for use during holiday. And then hundreds thousands cars got the traffic jam on the expressway. At last, some drivers got off the car and even pushed the car going forward, because they can only drive the car for 2 meters in 30 minutes. LOL

Okay, that's all for today's report, I'm Rick, from Shanghai, China. Please looking forward the next post on EC.

Thank you.