National Holiday

October 1^st to October 7^th was the National Holiday in China. October 1^st is National Day, and so the government orders a week of holiday. I had a weeklong break from school. On September 30^th I was told by my teacher not to go to school (for reasons unknown…), so I just stayed at home all day. When my host brother and mom got home at about six in the evening, they were just like “Okay, it’s National Holiday. Let’s go to Hebei.” Ten minutes later we were on our way to Hebei Province.

Traffic was absolutely horrible. China’s National Holiday is known as one of two “Golden Weeks” in China. Because so much of the country is on break, many people take the time to travel. This results in extremely horrible traffic. I’ve heard that travel by train is a complete disaster during this time.

We only stayed in Hebei for one day. We went to the same town that I had previously visited. This time I found out the name, though. I think it’s called Tangshen (that could be totally wrong, though.). The town is nice, but it’s sort of gross because it’s really polluted. This time I got to explore part of the town a bit. We went to some random, uninhabited house, but it was really cool because I got to see a typical Chinese garden. There was a lot of Chinese cabbage (which in Chinese is called “white vegetable,” even though it’s green). One of my host aunts and both of my host grandparents spent a lot of time picking vegetables and cleaning them. Later that day we took some home and have been eating them since.

The rest of the week was kind of boring. I didn’t do much. I tried Chinese “Italian food,” which wasn’t very Italian. I also went to a Chinese buffet, which was quite the experience. It was very similar to those Brazilian steakhouses that are kind of trendy in the US. They had a bunch of people carrying around different kinds of meats on trays and carts, and they would just come to your table and plop it into your plate. They even had pizza that they just threw onto the table. What was even scarier was the buffet portion. They had a pretty large buffet of random Chinese dishes, pastries, fruit, and beverages. As you should known by know, Chinese people like to eat a lot, so people were taking massive quantities of food from the buffet. It was unbelievable. They even had roast duck as part of the buffet, and it would empty really quickly. Whenever a new tray of duck would pass by on its way to the buffet, half of the restaurant (which was gigantic, by the way) would suddenly rush to the buffet and start pushing each other out of the way in order to get the duck.

I had to go to school today (Saturday) to make up for one of the days of the holiday. I think that is now the third Saturday where I’ve had to go to school.