As normally happens around this time of year for me, my contract is up for renewal which means I have to use my vacation days before the contract expires in November. Unlike other jobs, my unused vacation days don’t carry forward.
So, starting from September 27 until some time in the middle of October, I’m pretty much off work. It does feel a little bit odd being off work for such an extended period of time after not working for much of the year. There is also the fear that there is a second wave of “the virus” and that work could be shut down again. I highly doubt that but that reasoning is making a lot of people keep working throughout the National Day break.
When is the National Day? The official holiday runs from October 1st until 4th which means if you do work during that period, you get time and a half of more. However, most people take a full 7-10 days off from work which is made possible because, in China, moves work days around so no work is officially lost and so that the holiday can be extended. The holiday thus goes from October 1st until the 8th.
Why don’t I go somewhere? Because the crowds during this time are going to be insanely big. There are a lot of photos on the internet of places spilling over with people on the Great Wall and other points of interest. People love to come to Beijing for this period because it is the centre of the national celebration. Not everyone can get into Tiananmen Square to be a part of that crowd, but they would still come to take a look around the city.
It’s not like I won’t be doing anything. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the goals I have this year is to visit some sort of place of interest and do a small write up about it. So far we’ve gone to a Gem and Mineral Exhibition (by accident), BurgerFest, Today Art Museum. as well as having tried quite a few selections from Dao Xiang Cun, a rather famous bakery here in Beijing. For the next week, however, I’ll be laying low as everything will be crowded with tourists from around China. I’ll let them do their thing and see the stuff they want to see.
In the meantime, there are some other things I want to get done, notably study Chinese. I’ve read through the first nine chapters of my HSK 5 books to date which, to me, is impressive, since I only started them in the middle of August. So I plan to commit quite a bit of time to studying.
People were asking me why I was choosing to take time off of work to study instead of making money. The big reason is that I feel I need to get through the HSK 5 books as fast as possible or else I’ll hit a wall with my studies. If I’m able to complete the coursework by the new year, then I’ll be able to take all of next year to just focus on the HSK 6 books. That’s first.
The second reason is that Mandarin Chinese is something that I can take with me rather than some repetitive work. The job itself doesn’t really teach very much so, if I’m going to make use of my time in China, then I want to make sure I get as good of a hold as I can on the language before moving on, if and when that happens.
The other project I have bumping around in the back of my head is to start going through some of my old videos and playing around with them a little bit. I don’t think I would create a stock image collection (some aren’t of high enough resolution) but I think it would be neat to experiment and splice some of the different videos together. We’ll see.
Of course there is the podcast which takes quite a bit of my time. I’ve reached out and started talking to more people, something I never did with my blog itself. Although there is no central theme to the podcast as a whole (though it does include a lot of travellers and creative types), I think the conversations are informative nonetheless. There are lengthy, but I like them that way. These are a type of spoken record of my travels, in a manner of speaking, of the individuals I’ve met and some of the conversations I’ve had along the way. Yes, technology has allowed conversations to take place many miles away from each other, but it’s also made it a lot easier to produce this sort of show.
And with that, I’m off to vacation here at home.