Since it was just the October Holidays, a slightly insane amount of people and money changed places. It is a time when everyone who can have a holiday goes somewhere to hang out with millions of others. These are the moments that you are reminded of and astonished by the scale of this country once more.
Being a Dutch person, I of course was traveling as low budget as possible. And the good thing (for my wallet, not my back) is that seating places on trains are very cheap. The bad thing, besides your back hurting quite a lot, is that there are actually many people willing to stand in the train. For 4, 14 or 24 hours.
I could have known that it would be busy when I returned last Sunday from Nanjing to Shanghai. But in some misplaced optimism I thought it would be within certain boundaries. Of course it was not.
The thing with people standing in the aisles is, they take up space. Even more so when they have a suitcase. A large one. The train had become a venerable mountain landscape, incidentally the Chinese do use ‘people mountain people sea’ to express somewhere with a lot of people, where everyone had to literally lift their suitcases to get through the aisle.
Consequently, I sat on an aisle seat, sort of half reclined by somebody’s hip leaning on the seat and somebody else sitting against my upper leg on a quintessential Chinese tiny stool. To top it off, the grandpa next to me had no less than 3 smartphones, and played loud Chinese songs on each of them for every hour we traveled.
All in all, it was a typical Chinese journey. It really captured the charm of traveling during China’s national holiday. Thank the Communist Party for its existence.
Bitesized Writing 