Golden Week

The Golden Week: national holidays in China for one entire week from the 1st to the 7th of October - what a nighmare for travellers...

all queing up to squeeze into the same train...

Because it seems as if simply every Chinese person is travelling as well - which makes it super-difficult to get traintickets, trains are overcrowded (people are seriously standing in the train - and I'm not talking like standing all the way from Vienna to St. Pölten but standing 16 hours from Beijing to Xian - and a standing place does even cost as much as a sitting place) as well as all tourist sights, streets in cities,... or to make it easier: lets say simply EVERTHING EVERYWHERE is overcrowded. I mean, you would never feel alone in Chinese cities anyways, but where the hell do all these other people who seem to appear only for the national holidays hide during the rest of the year??

First I thought that it could be great fun still being in the capital during the start of this holidays but finally there is nothing special happening. Appart from huge amounts of people squeezing through the streets and alleyways, and flags hanging out of every door...

However, this week was full of events to me as well, which didn't have anything to do with the national holidays...

The very start of this public holidays was at the same time an end for me:  the end to my time in Beijing...

On the 1st of October we were celebrating one of the local couchsurfers birthday at the flat after a great dinner in a Ningxia-restaurant. The party was definitely great fun! And I took it as my goodbye-party from this great city as I was supposed to leave the following day! Having read my last story you know that I really really liked Beijing...

The day after the party I took the train to Xian.
While I had spent a lot of time with expatriates in Beijing and didn't really get to know many Chinese people, I got to know many on my way to and in Xian. The guy sitting next to me in the train - DaWei - turned out to be great fun, teaching me Chinese pronounciation and ending up giving me a Chinese name (娜仁).
In Xian itself I was surfing at another Chinese guy - GaoXu - who was really cool as well!

Due to limited ticket availability (guess why...) I stayed a bit longer in Xian than I first wanted - but finally it turned out to be great like this! GaoXu made sure that I had a great time there:

The first evening we met with a friend of his and walked through the Muslim Quarter - pulsing streets full with small restaurants and foodplaces: cooks who prepare food directly on the street, loads of delicious stuff! I was sooo impressed and really loved that place and the atmosphere (even though - again - there were soooo many people...)! 

Without GaoXu I would have never known about this very special dish (I have to ask him for the name of it... upcoming soon...) we were eating. And also in the upcoming days he would make me taste other typical dishes like a Hot Pot and some really delicious Jiaozi (dumplings -->) just before I left ... mhmmmmm

I met various of his friends during my stay: on the first evening for example some more friends of him would join us and we would go to a bar having beer (I admit that I found it sweet when he told me that he felt drunk after 2 small beers...).
He would constantly force his friends to speak English with me - for them to practice - and they would always say that they can't but end up speaking really well :)

But after all - the reason why I came to Xian in the first place was of course to see the Terracotta-Warriors. So on the third day of my stay in Xian GoaXu and me took the bus there (he guided me past the endless queues to a bus we could enter straight away). While he went to his university-campus I went to the sight.

So how about the warriors? You get exactly what you expect: loads of warriors lined up to protect their king Qin Shi Huang. It is really impressive though because they do really all look different and loads of them are not broken at all even though they had been burried over 2000 years ago! I can't imagine how long it must have taken them to build the army, even more as they had been all coloured as well what dissappeared during the millenia.

You want more photos? Here we go:

After my trip to the warriors I met GaoXu in his university campus - from 300BC straight back to 2011 ;) some friends of his showed me a typical Chinese dormitory room and I admit that this was to me as interesting as the warriors...

Still having time in Xian I rounded up my stay there with a nice bike-ride on the citywall on the last day. This was great fun I can tell you! And not to be underestimated: it took me - a few photobreaks included - more than an hour to bike the whole wall...

The national holiday week ends on the 7th - and with the end of it the unsupportable huge amount of people dissapears as well... On this very day I found myself again in an overcrowded train from Xian to Jiangyou (just to compare: in the train I took 4 days later from Chengdu to Shanghai everybody had a seat - can you imagine?!)

Within the upcoming 5 days - from the 7th to the 12th - I spent in total 66hours in trains, busses or waiting between trains and busses: this is in fact a huuuuuuge effort - effort for what?! To get to Jiuzhaigou.

 

This valley is not without a reason a UNESCO World Heritage - and it's not without a reason really expensive to go there - but still worth the effort and the money! And me being in China in autumn even more pushed me to take this effort, because the mix of turquois-blue seas, mountains, waterfalls, green and red leaves is too beautiful to be missed!

To get a maximum out of it I entered the park as early as 7am. Just to give you a slight idea of the size of it:  from the entrance to one peak its 31km - and there are two peaks... The whole reserve is perfectly organised with busses inside, hiking-trails everywhere and loads of maps to show you where you are. And even small signs every now and then hanging on trees saying which sort of tree it is... 

So I was of course hiking a lot, taking loooads of photos (you might have seen them already, if not: here we go) and when I got out of the park at around 5pm I had just managed to see about more or less every worth-seeing part of the park. 

What a golden week this was indeed...