Today, the 23rd of January 2012. Is that in some way or another have some significance to you? Well if it doesn’t, let me give you some hints. It’s the day where people go home and celebrate with their families, pray to their ancestors, clean their house, light up fire crackers, give red envelope filled with money to the youngsters and go to temples, especially Chinese people. It’s CHINESE NEW YEAR!! For Chinese people their real new year is actually TODAY and you may wonder why I’m writing about it in my blog, well that’s because (first of all) I’m Thai part Chinese and secondly, the time of Chinese New Year have caused the biggest human migration as well!
People from all over China travel to see their parents and family in time of the New Year celebration, as we all know China has HUMONGOUS amount of people. Anyone who visits China at this time of the year would all be surprised, not because of the beautiful decorations and food all around but the insane amount of people! It would be easy if these crowds would last for a few days, but believe it or not the places stay as crowded as can be for about 40 DAYS!
Can you imagine the number of people migrating at this time? 235 MILLION PEOPLE. Yea that’s right TWO HUNDRED THIRTY FIVE MILLION PEOPLE migrating at the same time. How would you like to mingle and squeeze yourself through that much amount of people? Of course overcrowding isn’t the only problem, but it is the main cause of the following problems such as: tickets of planes and railway trains are sold out real quick, not enough for 235 million people to migrate in time, consequentially making them angry. You may say, why not book your seats on internet a month before? The answer is, you can’t, since not many Chinese adults use them and for those that do know how to use the internet there are still obstacles. There were times when the booking website got 1.4 million hits or close and that often crash the system. Most people have to buy walk-in tickets, again these lines are not short and quick. Some people have to wait for hours to finally get their chance to reserve seats for their family and themselves, only to find out later that all that’s left are standing tickets in a crowded train on a trip over 40 hours.
As for all of you bloggers and readers that are not Chinese what are you opinion? If it was me, I would say “This is the craziest and insane thing I’ve ever heard in my life, I have never imagine Chinese New Year to be this troublesome and tiring.” Why would anyone stand on a train for 40 hours, just to go eat dinner? But on the other hand, this is exactly what makes Chinese New Year so unique and beautiful. It is the time where people go home and reunited with their parents after working for the whole year and enjoying the pretty feeling in the air. Even though the path way there may be filled with troubles but in my opinion what you get out of it is worth going through all that problems.
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