From Diwali to CNY

CNY can stand for Chinese Yuan (the money) or Chinese New Year, this year, it stands for Chinese Niu Year (Niu=Cow in Chinese).

I am so happy to be home for the new year since it really is the biggest festival here, try to imagine, the train station of Guangzhou delivers 800,000 passengers a day a week before the big day, which means we evacuate a whole Chandigarh in one day, so you guess how big the festival is. It is an event for which people would pay double the price just to get a single ticket home, even when he needs to stand on the train for some 20 hours.

Holi is big, Diwali is bigger, but I can say Chinese New Year is even more, in terms of size. Even though, I always let go of my mind back to those days when we play holi in Vikram's big house and try to duck down from the eggs on the street, also those days when we had a big dinner in Jodhpur under the fort, sipping beer and enjoying the Rajasthani dance. Comparatively, India is far more disorganized than home, but the magic is no matter where you are now, you will still miss those days when you stay in a crappy hotel, pinch your nose when you walk pass a big pile of shit and garbage or running away from a river of auto-rickshaw, sometimes I think, it's amazing because of the tradition and the consistence of keeping it.

So Chak De, Bharat!!!

A Bike Trip

sorry guys I was not able to update here since there seemed to be some problem connecting Blogger in China, but anyways now it works well.

Right now I am on a bike trip from Guilin to Guangzhou. The first 2 days were really tiring because I was really new in cycling and chose the wrong tires, sigh. 2 days ago I changed some parts of the bike and found it saved me 20% of my energy and, makes me feel I am actually not that shitty in cycling, haha. Exciting!

At this moment I am sitting in my college roommate's house in Wuzhou, the border line of Guangxi and Guangdong Province. Wuzhou is really beautiful, locating at the junction of 3 rivers and on a mountain range. Tmw I will be cycling 120km till Deqing City in Guangdong, hopefully I will be home by the day after tomorrow.