From Osaka, I left Japan for Shijiazhuang, China to visit the city where I was born. I wanted to go visit my relatives and spend Chinese New Year with them because I’ve never visited during this time before and the last time I spent Chinese New Year in China was when I was in kindergarten. Although I had visited Shijiazhuang a handful of times before, this time felt different. It felt like a trip down memory lane.
Originally I wrote this article in the same format as my other photo journals, where it consisted entirely of photos with captions. Most of the photos I took here in Shijiazhuang were of family or from a walk I took with my grandpa through the city. He took me to their old house where I had spent a lot of time as a kid, he took me to a place where we used to watch trains come and go, and took me to see my old kindergarten. It was a literal walk down memory lane. I also attended my cousin’s wedding which coincidentally was happening during this same period of time.
However, halfway through writing this photo journal I had a strong sudden aversion towards publishing any of the photos, because I realized these memories were not something I needed to blast out to the internet (even though nobody really reads these as far as I know).
I have a goal of writing a post for each city I visited during my 6 months of backpacking so I still wanted to publish this post for consistency’s sake. However at least for now this post will remain empty.
I was in Shijiazhuang, China between January 18th - Febuary 6th, 2019. The banner image is from lunch at my grandparent’s house, they made dumplings for me to celebrate Chinese New Year.