Holiday rainbow offers pots of gold, but doesn’t always deliver
It took time, but I have learned my lesson about how to enjoy Chinese holidays: Never, never, never visit a tourist attraction at a time when half a billion people across China are also visiting tourist attractions.
Over the National Day break a couple of years ago, my wife and I took a bus to the newly built Ancient Gubei Water Town north of Beijing with its network of canals and small rivers. It’s cool, despite not really being ancient. The only drawback was that the narrow streets and alleys were teeming with people. It was a human anthill.
The heavy crowd was especially hard on my wife. While I’m tall enough to see over heads, she is shorter. Her view for most of the day was a monotonous jungle of bodies as we inched along, dodging barbecued squids on pointed sticks now and then.
Actually, maybe I’m thinking of the squids brandished by people in crowded Houhai park in Beijing the year before, or recalling the undulating mass of humanity atop the Great Wall the year before that. Perhaps all of the above. I forget.
No matter. They say there’s no education in the second kick of a mule (let alone the third or fourth), and I had suffered enough on holiday excursions. Airlines booked. Trains booked. Hotels booked. Crowds everywhere.
So this year I refused to be lured out. I planned to spend a comfortable, quiet week near home in Beijing.
One problem became apparent right away, however. Hardly any businesses were open — which I don’t understand. Half a billion Chinese people were milling around the country all week, cellphones stuffed with virtual cash. You’d think a business would see them as a pot of gold at the end of the holiday rainbow. I couldn’t help but wonder why China’s shop owners don’t reap the obvious holiday bonanza and take time off afterward. Walking away from a pot of gold doesn’t seem like good business.
With reduced opportunity to shop, we had to find alternative activities. This meant a lot of daily walks. (Shivering in subzero temperatures all week, I realized that heavy crowds do have the advantage of emitting collective body heat.)
Anyway, the triumph of our week of walking was the fulfillment of a long-held plan to stroll the full length of a narrow park along a canal near our home — several kilometers, or, according to the WeRun app, around 20,000 steps. And so we set off.
The park was lovely in the winter chill. We enjoyed the clean stone pathways, skeletal trees, evergreens and occasional large sculptures. There were pleasant people, old and young, some walking their pets, others just walking. And all, even the pets, were bundled up against the cold.
Onward we marched, making a left turn as the park followed the canal to the south.
Then, with joy, we saw the path’s terminus in the distance. I could make out a sort of stone parapet, or tower, such as you might see on the Great Wall. It provided a view of a tangled highway interchange below, which may sound anticlimactic, but it wasn’t. For us it was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
I bounded up the final steps to see what treasures awaited. And, yes, indeed, I found numerous small gifts scattered around the platform, left behind by past visitors — along with various clumps of tissue paper. It was a moment to remember. And to step carefully.