I had been warned about travelling during Spring Festival in ffice:smarttags" />China. It was supposed to be mayhem. Getting anywhere was near impossible. The whole of China was on the move. I sat on a half-empty plane from Guiyang to Beijing, annoyed that I’d spent five times the train ticket price on a plane trip, after having been led to believe buying train tickets would be impossible, when Wendy was sitting on a train having bought her ticket with no problem only the previous day. I wondered whether it was exaggeration or good management which had led to this situation, and decided it must be the latter. I had had 6 planes to choose from that day, and many extra trains had also been put on to cope with the demand. I was impressed, I doubt they could ever deal with such a situation in the UK. As soon as I arrived in Beijing a friendly student came over to help me decide which shuttle bus I should take, and despite my insistence that I could manage, took the bus with me, got off with me at the right stop, fended off hawkers, and put me in a taxi after making sure the driver knew where my youth hostel was.

fficeffice" /> 

Beijing was nice. But cold. After leaving behind 20 degrees and bright sunshine in Guiyang, snow one day and clear skies and minus 20 degree temperatures the next was a bit of a contrast. I was sort of fed up of sightseeing, but I made myself play the interested tourist nonetheless, and dutifully spent several days wandering through the Forbidden City, round the Summer Palace lake, and through narrow old streets. People would come up to me, as for example one young man when I was trying to make my way the long way through the streets to get to the other side of Tiananmen Square when it was cordoned off due to a meeting taking place inside. He hurried out of a canteen to walk with me, exchanging a few words about the weather and Beijing before gasping in shy excitement that he’d been studying English for ten years and had never met a real foreigner before. The long route took a long time, and he walked with me for about an hour, making himself very useful by taking a photo of me by the gate of Tiananmen, without which I would have no pictures of myself in Beijing. Another young man came and sat with me on a kerb in Tiananmen Square as I munched through a bag of conkers for my breakfast one morning. He told me that for the night of Chinese new year there would be no kind of events I could go to. Not in Tiananmen Square anyway, as I’d kind of hoped, as they didn’t like people gathering there. Oh yes of course, silly me. So on new year’s eve I had dinner in the hotel and watched the Chinese new year TV, where singers and comedians entertained the nation. Most Chinese spend the evening with their families, so there wasn’t much going on. From the next day though, the festival began, and there were lots of fun things to see. In parks and along streets, stalls were lined up selling everything from mini scarecrows to colourful hand-held windmills to scorpions and starfish on sticks if you fancied a quick bite to eat. In temples, people prayed for a happy year, threw their own incense sticks onto piles of other people’s, threw coins at gongs and had their name engraved onto good luck metal objects. As I approached the gate of a temple complex, I saw a very long queue of people stretching back for about 600 metres. I was confused, and there was no way I was waiting in that just to go and see what it was like in a temple on new year’s day. But at the gate I saw other people walking straight in from the other side. I bought a ticket and entered by the short queue. Inside, I saw that all of those people were waiting in a queue for several hours to rub a stone which made up part of an archway. Must be good luck or something.

On my last evening there I met up with a Chinese friend who I knew from my time in Japan. He and two of his friends took me to a restaurant in Beihai Park which is called the Emperor’s Dining Room or something. It’s all gold, and you eat Emperor’s food there. I had been eating vegetarian for a few days by then, but I could hardly refuse to eat any of this. It was very very very expensive, and the Chinese way is that they couldn’t let me pay for any of it. So I enjoyed eating like an Empress and talking to these people who studied at the best university in China, who my students would probably have fainted in awe at meeting. Then we went to a very swanky bar, again with extortionate prices and very small drinks, and I had a fun evening of experiencing Beijing’s rich lifestyle.

The next day I tried to go to Mao’s mausoleum, but it was closed even though the signs indicated it should be open. Then I tried to go to the Temple of Heaven park, but I missed the right bus stop by about 7 stops, and then tried to walk back to it but was much further away than I thought I was, which I discovered after walking for about an hour and a half. So I gave up. I picked up my rucksack from the hotel and went to the train station. I was happy to learn that I’d managed to buy exactly the right ticket several days before. In Beijing train station, so the Lonely Planet says, there is a ticket office just for foreigners. Yeah ok where? There was none that I could see. I had gone to the ticket office and done the trick that always worked perfectly in Japan – stand looking around confusedly, and at least 4 random people will come running within seconds, asking “Can I help you?” It didn’t work in Beijing. I stood looking confused for about 10 minutes but no-one cared. There were about 30 ticket windows, all dealing with different things, and no English signs. Luckily I can read Chinese well enough to pick what I was reasonably sure was the right window, and stood in line with my heart thumping in my chest for 5 minutes, preparing myself mentally for trying to buy a ticket from someone who I knew would probably not speak English and would probably sneer at me and be totally impatient and tell me to go away and not understand a word of my Chinese and would probably make me cry. Sure enough, she didn’t speak English, and she did sneer, and she was impatient, but she didn’t tell me to go away and she did understand my Chinese, and sold me the right ticket. So I got onto the train for Chongqing and a nice man put my bag up onto the top bunk for me. The top bunk is the cheapest, and is very claustrophobic because you can’t sit up and you’re squished between hard bed and ceiling. But you can sleep in it, and I spent the daytime sat in a very uncomfortable fold down chair by the window with my book, where at least it was not claustrophobic and at least I could see a view. Some of the train workers cornered me in the wash-hand-basin-room and gigglingly asked me all sorts of questions about where I was from and why I was in China. And then after 25 hours I arrived back in Chongqing. The train station was packed, and I had my only experience of busy Spring Festival travel, as I made my way through the crowds from the train to the buses which would take me back to my nice little flat.