Chinese New Year 2012

Sun 22 January 2012 | Last updated on Tue 06 December 2022

The Chinese New Year aka Spring Festival is the most important festival in Chinese culture. All the people travel back to their hometown, because most of them are working/studying in cities far from their own hometown. That means all train tickets are sold the day they get available and plane tickets are super expensive. Luckily Marry was able to order train tickets via her university, so we didn't have to go through the hardship of having to buy the tickets ourself. But there was a little problem with this solution as the tickets will be on somebody's passport, because I she cant order them on my name because I'm not a student on her uni.

So the 18th we took the train, I was really nervous as I also did not have my passport and the train ticket not being on my name. My passport is being hold for extending my visa, and they lately required everybody to show their passport, else you wouldn't be able to enter the train station. But everything went fine in the end, the first security check I just pretended I didn't understand and then they smiled and let me through. After that they only checked the tickets so it was ok.

The train trip itself was pretty decent, could watch outside and there weren't as many people as I expected. I heard horror stories about not being able to move at all in the train. It was hard but not impossible, as people were standing / sitting on the ground because they didn't have a seat. We were sitting together with students from Marrys uni, so we talked with them the whole trip, was pretty fun. Time went quite fast and even managed to sleep for 5 hours.

Here in Fuzhou I'm mostly still working so didn't have time to go to many places yet. Yesterday went to the country side to celebrate new years with hotpot, a big meal and visited some relatives. The country side was quite amazing they had small roads and all houses are different as most of them build the houses them self. Also went to walk around a little and found a nice castle and river. Will go there again in the evening.

My overal impression of Fuzhou is pretty good, I like the atmosphere and the traffic is much better than Beijing. There are also palm trees and many tropical trees, which I like.