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Ambitions tempered with festivity on first post-holiday working day

BEIJING, Feb. 25 (Xinhua) -- Firecracker booms rocked Changchun, northeast China's Jilin Province, Sunday morning, as businesses and individuals prayed the first working day in the Chinese year of the pig would prelude fortune.

Nearly all the stores and companies in the city lit firecrackers before they opened for business on Sunday. "We hope the long, loud booms will bring us good luck in the new year," said a storekeeper close to the downtown Yongchang Market.

The firework session at a bank in the neighborhood lasted for at least 15 minutes, attended by the entire staff.

A retiree said he was about to dial the fire alarm when he woke up to the booms. "It's unusual on the eighth day of the Chinese New Year, and I thought a firecracker store might have caught fire," he said, giving only his family name as Zhu.

His wife came back from her grocery shopping trip in time to stop him. "She said it's the fashion to light firecrackers at workplace on the first working day."

Most of China's working population are back to work on Sunday after the week-long holiday starting on Feb. 18, the Chinese New Year Day.

Nearly every one has dreams for the year of the pig: a better job, further education, an apartment, a future husband or wife. But these have to give way, for the moment, to an exchange of new year greetings, post-holiday excitement and fatigue.

Desks are piled with snacks from different parts of the country as office workers are returning from their homecoming trips -- some of whom took an overnight train and got to the office with their suitcases.

Taking advantage of the post-holiday lull, many people are still immersed in festivity: sharing holiday adventures with friends and colleagues, or browsing the Internet for fun.

At www.taobao.com, one of the country's biggest e-commerce websites, some white-collar workers are trying to resell their surplus New Year gifts.

A netizen in Shanghai nicknamed "jihuangph7" offered to resell a dainty package of Nestle coffee for 70 yuan (9 U.S. dollars), 40percent off the original buying price.

Meanwhile, many Internet users are willing to swap their gifts for more useful items at www.comhuan.com, China's largest online swapping website where netizens have come up with nearly 300 categories of New Year gifts for exchange, ranging from tobaccos, liquor, snacks, healthcare products to firecrackers and Chinese lanterns.

"We opened the platform hoping to fully exploit the value of New Year gifts, many of which are quite expensive but not necessarily useful to their owners," said Zhu Renjie, chief executive of the website.

Exchange of gifts, visits and dinner parties with liquor often top the Chinese people's agenda during the traditional holiday. Many people feel exhausted at the end of the holiday and a long journey back to the workplace simply makes it worse.

"I managed to get a train ticket to Beijing on Saturday. It was overcrowded and I had no seat. Fortunately it took just six hours," said Zhu Lin, an editor at a Beijing-based media organization. Her home in Shenyang of the northeastern Liaoning Province is 730 km from Beijing.

Saturday alone saw a record 56.53 million people traveling from home or holiday resorts back to their workplaces and the mass migration will last for another week, until after the Lantern Festival on March 4.

Ministry of Railways estimated an average 4.5 million passengers are taking trains daily during the post-holiday rush between Feb. 23 and 27.

Railway authorities in Xi'an, capital of the northwestern Shaanxi Province, warned on Sunday tickets to Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou had been sold out for the coming week.

Even for the lucky ones who get tickets, doctors warn the strain of tiring train rides can be detrimental.

A man aboard an overcrowded train to Nanjing was heard laughing and talking to himself before he attempted to jump off the window of the fast train on Friday. Police stopped him in time and rushed him to hospital.

He was diagnosed of a temporary mental handicap, a result of fatigue, malnutrition and lack of oxygen. "We've received several cases during the Spring Festival passenger peak," said Dr. He Danjun at the Jiangsu Provincial People's Hospital.

This year, more than 2 billion passenger trips are expected to be taken during the 40-day holiday stampede that began on Feb. 3.

Misty weather put a crimp in the post-holiday passenger rush Sunday as heavy fog closed expressways between Beijing and the nearby city of Tianjin and adjacent Hebei province, between Beijing and northeastern China, and between Tianjin and Shanghai.

The central meteorological station said Beijing will clear up on Monday but some central and eastern provinces will remain foggy.

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