Golden Week holiday
Golden Week Diaries: A Wedding, a Mountain, Cosplay & a Spiritual Feast 🇧🇷🇨🇳
AI was awesome, It did make the first picture of this post for me, It did include all my activities of this week in one nice blended picture, and I like it very much…
- 🥾 The mountain trail with hikers between the trees and the cliff-edge moment
- 📸 The comic con crowd with cosplayers — and you in your scout shirt taking photos
- 💐 The elegant wedding venue glowing in the background
- 🛋️ The cozy rest-at-home scene for the conference days
- 🏮 Red and gold National Day lanterns tying it all together
Five days of National Day holiday. Five completely different adventures. One pair of very sore (but very happy) feet.
💍 Day 0: The Wedding That Started It All
Golden Week kicked off in style — literally. On October 1st, I attended a Chinese wedding for the very first time, and it was exciting and beautiful beyond what I expected.
Fun surprise: the ceremony itself was surprisingly Western-style, and the venue? Absolutely stunning — the kind of place where you know someone spent a lot of money. What a way to start the holiday!
The full story (and all the details) is in another post — but let's just say it set the bar high for the rest of the week. 💐
🥾 Day 1: Conquering the Mountain (Slowly, With Many Breaks)
Friday, 7:00 AM. Alarm goes off. Bus departs. Lisa and I, along with a whole group of strangers-turned-friends, head out for what was advertised as a "hike" and turned out to be a 10-kilometer full circle around a mountain — nine hours of it.
And honestly? Worth every step.
Imagine a beautiful trail winding between tall trees and green grass, sunshine filtering through the leaves... and occasionally a stretch where the path hugs the edge of a cliff just enough to make you reconsider your life choices. 😅 Sometimes we were leading the group, sometimes we were trailing behind (there may have been a connection between those moments and our snack breaks).
What made the day truly special was the people. It didn't take long for the group to discover I was from Brazil, and suddenly I wasn't just a hiker anymore — I was the Brazilian. Great conversations, lots of laughs, new friendships. Lisa and I had our own rhythm, but the whole group adopted me along the way.
Fun fact: there were actual guides with walkie-talkies keeping us organized and safe the entire time. Professional operation. The price for this full-day organized adventure? About 45 yuan. The best day of my month, for less than a fancy coffee in most big cities.
📸 Day 2: From Mountain Trails to Anime Legends
After nine hours of hiking, a reasonable person would rest (but not me). So naturally, the next day I went to a comic con from 10 AM to 5 PM, standing and wolking most of the time. 🙃
This time I joined a few of students and friends from English corner, and my mission was simple: hunt down every cosplayer in sight and get photos with them. Mission status: highly accomplished. So many amazing costumes, so many pictures — all captured on my GoPro and cellphone, which also survived the mountain the day before (check my latest YouTube video for the full footage of both days!).
Here's the plot twist: I wore my scout shirt with my Halloween tie, and suddenly I was getting stopped for photos almost as much as the actual costumed characters. Was it the outfit? The tie? The foreigner factor? I'll let you decide. Either way, I leaned into it fully. When in a comic con, be the content. 😎
🛋️ Days 3 & 4: The Best Kind of Rest
By Sunday, my feet had officially filed a formal complaint. Two full days on them — one on a mountain, one in a convention center — meant it was time for a completely different kind of adventure: staying home.
And the timing couldn't have been more perfect. It was General Conference weekend for - The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — but with the time difference (I'm about 12 hours ahead of Salt Lake City here in China),Saturday's sessions aired here on Sunday, and Sunday's sessions on Monday. Normally that would be a scheduling headache, but this time? Monday was still a holiday. 🙌
So I got two full days at home: body resting, spirit feasting. Awesome messages, peaceful atmosphere, exactly what my legs ordered.
Bonus gift from the weekend: my son Bernardo called, and we had a really nice, long chat. Always love to talk to my kids, it made my day - if they only knew this . . . ❤️
The Verdict
Two more days of holiday still ahead, and my National Day break is already a complete success — exciting, adventurous, and unexpectedly uplifting too.
So far China has been one of the most exciting country I have been to, and since I am here from 2018 it is also the country I have been the longest. Looking forward to stay a few more years if it is possible.
UPDATE: 2026-10-07
On the last day of the holiday (Wednesday 2026 Oct 7) I went out with Lui Le, a friend of a long time ago (since 2023) she just graduate last August and she was coming back to the university to pick up her graduation certificate. She did not have that graduation certificate yet because she went to United states on an internship to improve her English, her english was already good but I could notice the improvement after 3 months in USA.
We went downtown to Zhengzhou Longhu Park wetlands where she did give the full report on her internship, it was nice to hear from her how good was her experience in United States. Next day she went on to pick her graduation certificate and went back home to move on her life next chapters.
I will probably never see her again, and that is part of the cost of going abroad and make friends…
Article by Marcelo Gameiro
Published 05 Oct 2026