A busy golden week
People kept themselves busy in different ways during the week-long Chinese New Year holiday.
Holiday shopping
Holiday retailing saw great prosperity after most online shops halted business during the Chinese New Year.
The first few warm and sunny days of the holiday drew people to many shop-ping areas across the city. Clothing, jew-ellery and electronic products were the best-selling holiday items, according to major retailers downtown.
During the holiday, restaurants be-gan their busy day every noon, while most department stores had their gold-en time of the day from 1pm. Most shop-pers, the retailers said, were local citi-zens and farmers from the suburbs.
The Chinese New Year celebration overlaps the winter vacation, so there were huge discounts for students’ fa-vorite goods, especially electronic prod-ucts. And the upcoming Valentine’s Day also pushed up the sale of jewellery. Horse-shaped gold necklaces were ex-tremely popular, as the horse is the Chi-nese zodiac sign for this year.
Most winter clothing was discounted by 50%-70% during the holiday, with days warming up to feel like spring. Many shoppers were interested in new arrivals for spring. Traveling
Locals are most willing to loosen the purse strings for trips during the Spring Festival.
Of the domestic destinations, Hainan and Yunnan provinces were the two most popular due to their warm weath-er. Northeast China, Fujian and Sichuan provinces ranked the third to the fifth most popular destinations.
Crowds also headed to nearby cities for hot spring bathing. Suzhou’s Yishe Hot Spring, Nanjing’s Tangshan Hot Spring, and Changshu’s Haiquanwan Hot Spring got the most bathers.
Over half of those who booked tours online were heading overseas, accord-ing to the Suzhou branch of online pack-age tour provider Tuniu.com. Statistics from the website showed the most sought-after overseas destinations were South Korea, Europe, and the Maldives. Of the Asian destinations, Bali, Thai-land, Cambodia, and the Philippines at-tracted most tourists from Suzhou.
Package trips to Europe used to con-tain many countries on a single trip, but Suzhou tourists have begun making in-tensive trips to a single European coun-try. Romantic France, beautiful Greece and historic Italy were popular des-tinations for intensive trips.
While traveling within China, most tourists were inclined to go for do-it-yourself trips. Some families gathered in one group and hired a driver to tailor their own trip. Visiting local attractions
We should not forget that Suzhou is also a popular tourist destination. Tourists began to flow in to experience Suzhou-style Chinese New Year celebrations on February 3 and 4.
Touring local gar-dens, watching Kun-qu opera, eating noodles at Tongdexing Noodle Restaurant, and drinking tea at local parks were some of the experiences out-of-towners were eager to have.
The fifth day of the first month on the Chinese lunar calendar, or February 4, is said to be the birthday of the God of Wealth and also an auspicious day to welcome him. The celebration of the day is a big part of the Spring Festival tradi-tion. Many ancient streets, towns and temples held activities to welcome the God of Wealth. Tourists swarmed to Shantang Street, Tongli Town, Zhouzhuang Town and Buddhist tem-ples where the God of Wealth is believed to live.
Meanwhile, districts and county-level cities of Suzhou had lantern shows in the evenings. The lantern show in Gusu District was at the ancient Xumen Gate; the lantern show in Wuzhong District was held in Mudu Town. In SND, the Suzhou-Taiwan Lantern Festival was held in Suzhou Amusement Land.