This week is the “Golden Week Holiday”. It started on the 1^st of October, and stretches to the 7^th. For elementary schoolteachers like myself, that means a whole week off. If you happen to work at an academy, or “Cram School” then you get 3 days off. It’s a nice time to spend with my family, but not friends. It’s a good time to re-acquaint ourselves with the city.

Golden Week is a holiday created in celebration of the creation of the Ruling Political Party of China. It used to be 5 days but it was expanded a few years ago to be a whole week. Like most major holidays in China this is a time when everyone goes back to their hometown to spend time with their family, for us this means that all of our friends have skipped town. The population of Beijing dropped to about ½ of what it usually has. The tourism industry does well, restaurants, shopping& hotels. Collared work (White and Blue) comes to a halt, the number of taxis is bare minimum, and the city feels empty, unless you’re in the shopping district.

While we get a week off, a few of my friends who are still at academies start work again tomorrow. I used to have this schedule, and do not envy them. Cram schools are at their busiest during holidays, as parents take any opportunity to force knowledge into their child’s head by enrolling them into 12~16 hours of class a day (An exaggeration, but not by much, some children have 6~12 hours a day on holidays), which as an educator I can say, these extra classes don’t usually help the student’s grades or learning, but if done right can help the child enjoy the subject, which will eventually help them. But academies are not in it for the education they want the money!

This week we have traveled around a bit. We discovered an electronics market, where we got phone numbers set up (on cheap old phones until we unlock our Canadian phones). It is easy to get to, now that the city has opened up Line 14 of the Subway. We have discovered that the kids have outgrown their old playgrounds that we used to take them to. We have taken the kids to see the Minion Movie (In 3 D), awesome by the way. We have had Italian, Korean, Chinese and North American Food for dinners.

While we are still in the school Dorm, we cannot actually look at apartments during Golden Week, because the real estate agents that can rent us out places are short staffed during the time and unable to show places until the owners are back from holiday. We are also unable to go the bank and set up a way to send money back to Canada until after the holiday because we have no translator to help us with this.

Our original Plan was to send money to our PayPal international from the Chinese Bank, and then send it to the Pay Pal Canada, and deposit it into the Bank back home. But this won’t work. It won’t work because I have a long name. The bank system in China has limited space for names to be put the account under. Since my name is long they removed the spaces in my name. so My name is a single long word. Well some of you know, that the name on the PayPal account has to match the bank account name, but pay pal needs 2 names…. So we are setting up the system to send money to our Credit Cards in Canada, and then we can pay back our bills from that.

Its late night and tomorrow we take the kids to the arcade (Or Maybe down town we will see) Good Night