Spring no rest-ival

Chinese tradition dictates that at this time of year you should be spending most of your savings, traveling half way across the country and setting fire to boxes of explosives in a countdown to spend that one special day with your family and some of the worst televisual entertainment mankind has ever known.

But what about the shops that stay open all hours, the leisure activities that are so popular over the holiday and the restaurants that play host to red-faced grandfathers and screaming children? Someone has to be there to batten down the hatches and keep the ship sailing while the rest of the country takes the day off.

In Spain, the siesta has begun it's swansong in the capital of Madrid in order to keep the financial wheels turning. In Southern Italy, Ferragosto, a Catholic national holiday, normally means desolate streets, but is now reasonably sprightly and major restaurant chains and stores stay open longer than they used to. That's not to mention all the poor souls around the world who have to keep slogging away on Christmas Day, missing family dinners and nurturing their sense of anger and repressed rage at the world.

Why should Beijing, with its des-perate desire to be a major interna-tional city, be any different? Around the busy CBD, there are plenty of people who will be stuck here, serving the leftover foreigners and catering to bare essentials that the locals forgot to buy before the holiday.

"I've been working in a shop for 10 years. For about half of those I've had to work over the Spring Festival holiday," says Xu Bin, 28, a Beijinger and 24 hour supermarket manager. "This year I'm working through the day and night, but I can't say that it bothers me too much now - I'm used to it." He actually seemed grateful that he'd be missing the CCTV Spring Festival Gala this year, which he says has been getting worse and worse. However, Xu was a little disappointed that he could not spend some much needed time with his girlfriend.

He also says the way the city works is changing. "A lot of native Beijingers aren't willing to work in the service industry," he said. "This means the jobs are filled by migrant workers. Come Spring Festival you then find a lot of people who aren't able to go home or see their families. You have to remember there are now three times more people from other provinces in Beijing than there are Beijingers."

It's the migrants that bear the brunt of a Spring Festival workload, although if this year's train tickets are anything to go by, working may be the least of their problems. Money is a major concern, and Beijing is a demanding city over issues of wealth. "I'm actually working two jobs over the Spring Festival day, one in the morning and one in the evening," said Chang Minghong, 30, a waitress at a chuanr restaurant from Shanxi Province.

"I think the way we deal with the festival is changing a bit. You have to have fun yourself, but people can no longer neglect their businesses," she added. "A business needs to be kept running and everyone involved needs to make some money. The festival will be pretty busy, so it's a good op-portunity to make some extra cash."

The obvious essentials for shop-pers, namely supermarkets and restaurants, are bound to have the odd employee lingering listlessly by the door. So too are tobacco-nists and alcohol sellers, if only in order to cater to the police who will undoubtedly be on duty. And it goes without saying that a few emergency staff will be about at the hospitals.

But aside from the bare essentials, some rather more unusual personal services are choosing to keep their doors open over the period when the rest of the country is on holiday. "Me and my colleagues will all be working over Spring Festival, day and night," said 23-year-old Song Shuangyan, a massage parlor worker. The massage parlor normally operates 24 hours, although for the festival they've reduced their opening time to between midday and midnight. "It's not so bad. We are like a family and the boss has said that he'll be providing some jiaozi and knickknacks on the day for us. It'll be like a festival away from home," she adds. "I don't think that the city is particularly changing in its attitude to Spring Festival, but rather it's just the personal decisions people are willing to make have slightly changed."

It doesn't look like Beijing has become so fast-paced as to give up on the time-honored fam-ily dumpling eating competition, while grandpa drinks himself blind on baijiu in the corner. But perhaps things are just chang-ing a little bit. Perhaps in a couple of decades the chunyun (Spring Festival migration) disaster will be a thing of the past, and there'll be no one to let off fireworks outside your apartment building at 10 in the morning.