Throwback Thursday: Nothing Changes, Holidays Are Still Hell
Throwback Thursday takes a look back into Beijing's past, using our nine-year-strong blog archives as the source for a glance at the weird and wonderful of the city's past.
As we grow older people tend to become more conservative; your joints stiffen, your teeth loosen, and your outlook on life solidifies, hopefully into something positive but usually not. This fact became oh-so-obvious when the UK – my aging and existential crisis-ridden home country – left Europe, or when my granddad stopped watching football because the players would slap each others arses when substituting onto the pitch.
That's why we can take comfort in the fact that some things never change, even if they're things that are utterly shit. Exhibit A: China has apparently always housed a billion people within its borders and they all love to drop what they're doing on September 30 and get the hell away from of wherever their hukou requires them to be 99 percent of the time. I say "has always," but I just made that up. What I mean is that they definitely wanted to do that from as far back at 2007, when my esteemed former colleague Jerry Chan wrote about the incoming mess of National Day.
Well, this year will be no different, ECNS reporting that 79 percent of people will be heading out to Pizza Hut the wilderness, in the remaining three months of this year, 55 percent in the coming October National Holiday, up 12 percent compared to last, which is up 678 percent from 2007 (again, I made that up).
Great news for people looking to go to Hangzhou's West Lake (oh perfect, that's me), Beijing's Palace Museum, Shanghai Disneyland, and other tourist city hotspots such as Sanya, Jiuzaigou, and Lijiang is that you'll be affronted with the full force of humanity in all its consuming, belching, and yelling glory.
RELATED: Getting Out for the October Holiday: 5 Wholesome Beijing Day Trips
One good thing to come from all that consumption is that the economy will see RMB 478 billion blasted into it, a 13.5 percent increase from 2015, and the equivalent of an additional 800 kuai spent per person.
No word on whether the authorities will be looking to "weed out 'hidden dangers'" (see yelling above) as they did back in 2007, apparently because dangers of conservatism are much more out in the open now – my case in point: interrupted footie matches because of the weird feelings that arise from same-sex butt slapping, Brexit, and the mounting and absolute terror caused by holiday crowds. Unfortunately for us, the crowds will never change, only grow.
More stories by this author here.
Email: tomarnstein@thebeijinger.com
WeChat: tenglish_
Instagram: @tenglish__
Photo: acjv.com
