Photo by hiurich granja
Last week was National Day Holiday in China. National Day is October 1st, and Chinese people got the whole week of holiday, even though there are discussions of reducing the length of this official holiday in the future.
Because when 1.3 billion people are on holiday at the same time for a whole week, it can get pretty chaotic!
Imagine, the newspapers were revealing that there were 370 million tourists traveling last week here… 370 million!
It is more than the population of the USA, and it was the number of people who traveled over this single week! Hard to imagine.
Are we ever glad we left for Bhutan (that little kingdom of just 700,000 people), because Xiamen, China, where we live, is supposedly one of the favored tourist attractions in China!
And we thought that the streets were crowded here on a regular Saturday afternoon. I don’t even want to imagine how they were last week!
The newspaper also mentioned that on that holiday, Chinese people spent 15% more than 2 years ago. They spent 350 billion yuan (50 billion US$)!!
You have to hear this kind of numbers to realize that yes, the economic boom of China can change the lives of the Western world as we know it, forever.
By the way, on a final note, that holiday week is called the Golden Week, the right name for it, it seems!