A National Day Breather

Looking back, I’ve spent every National Day holiday at home, mostly because traveling during the holiday just isn’t worth it: an endless sea of the backs of people’s heads, plus the mental load of buying tickets, traffic jams, finding somewhere to stay, and all the rest. Just thinking about it feels suffocating, so every year I spend the long break lounging at home and binge-watching shows. Isn’t that the good life?

        And of course, being back home means indulging in some great food. Big-plate chicken, hot pot—you name it, I had to have it all. So ridiculously satisfying.

        Eating out is great, but you can’t do it every day, right? Well, the very day I got home, my uncle made us roast lamb leg and lamb ribs. Those ribs were sizzling with fat and smelled insanely good. What a treat! Just look at the ribs in the photo below: crisp on the outside, tender on the inside. Try them and you’ll know.

        And then there are the crayfish tails my uncle stir-fried below. I don’t know where he got the idea, but he added a few deep-fried eggs. They soaked up all that sauce and were honestly unbeatable. I’ve never tried the deep-fried eggs in luosifen, but these are probably just as good, right?

        Since this holiday was a long one, I also got to have yuanxiao, which I hadn’t eaten in ages—the kind rolled by hand, mind you—and hand-pulled noodles. I grew up eating all of these. Nothing more to say: the same familiar flavors, still fantastic.

        And of course, there were the numbing, spicy skewers made by my old buddy. That one flatbread alone was easily enough to keep me full for the whole day.

        For various reasons, tickets for both legs of this trip were incredibly hard to get. Unless you bought them the instant they went on sale, you basically had no chance. That’s also why I headed back to Beijing so early, and even then I had to get a ticket with a transfer in Taiyuan.

That transfer led to a little encounter. After arriving at Taiyuan Station, I had more than an hour to wait, so I decided to leave the station and buy something to tide me over. At the convenience store, I noticed someone asking to use an outlet to charge his phone, but the store didn’t have one available. I happened to be right there, so I let him use my power bank. We chatted, and I learned that he’d come from Suzhou and was traveling without any destination in mind: wherever he could get a ticket to, that’s where he went. From what I could see, his entire luggage was just one plastic bag, plus his phone. He relied entirely on rented power banks to charge it. He was even wearing clogs. Honestly, Taiyuan was pretty cold by then—I was wearing three layers myself.Hearing about his travels, I thought, now that’s really just getting up and going. You could tell he hadn’t planned a thing. Once his phone had enough charge to turn on, we said goodbye and went our separate ways.

        Later, after boarding the train to Beijing, I thought back on it. Honestly, I really envy that way of traveling: going wherever you want, with none of the mental load. You could tell he had real guts. It reminded me of a film I love, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Scenes from it still stir something in me from time to time.

Maybe, just maybe, I’ll do something like that someday too.