With her long curly blond hair, Michel McGrath stands out from the crowd of Chinese passengers in Beijing South Railway Station, waiting to begin their long New Year journeys home.
 
"I came very early this morning for fear of congestion, but it's turned out much better than I'd expected," said a relieved Michel, who has spent six years in China and was on her way to Shanghai.
 
"It is hard to imagine how our government would handle it if 'chunyun' happened in Ireland," she quipped.
 
The "chunyun" she mentioned is 40 days of holiday travel rush around Spring Festival. People often describe it as the biggest seasonal human migration on the planet. The torrent of travelers began on Jan. 16 and an estimated 3.62 billion trips will be made by train, plane, boat and bus before everything returns to normal on Feb. 25.
 
More than 257 million of those trips will be made by train.
 
It is not the first chunyun train Michel has taken. Recalling her first chunyun trip four years ago, she frowned and said: "People jostled each other on the train and all you could do was be patient. Be patient with everyone and avoid trouble."
 
For many foreigners, taking a train during the melee is more than just a painful part of the holiday routine. For some it is an interesting cultural phenomenon, worth experiencing and exploring. Patrick Yaw Sam from Ghana is one of them.
 
"I find chunyun both stressful and interesting," Patrick said. "Getting a ticket is quite hard and a Chinese friend helped me out."
 
Despite of crowds and difficulty in getting a ticket, he chose to travel by train, instead of other means. "You can see nothing from the plane, but you can see buildings and farms by train, and it is a cool way of traveling."
 
Patrick studies in the China University of Petroleum at the Qingdao campus. He had come to Beijing six days before and was heading back to Qingdao.
 
"I heard someone equal chunyun to other Chinese wonders like the Great Wall and Terra-cotta Warriors. Some people even change the saying 'who fails to reach the Great Wall is no hero' to 'who fails to experience chunyun is no hero', though I think they are exaggerating a little bit. Still, chunyun is a truly interesting experience for me," he said.
 
"It' s hard to find parallels to chunyun in other countries. It came into being in a unique way. China has the largest population in the world, and when Spring Festival comes, students, workers and almost everyone will go home," said Feng Yan of the Communication University of China.
 
"Also, Spring Festival -- unlike Thanksgiving or Christmas -- lasts quite a long time - from about a week before New Year to the lantern festival," Feng said. "Besides, many countries don't have railway networks like China. In the US, people drive or fly home for holidays, so it's hard to see scenes like chunyun in other countries."
 
Feng, who was born in China but grew up in Zurich, said people outside China have two main impressions of chunyun. "Some still believe the Chinese people have to squeeze onto the train through the windows, and that trains are slow and shabby; while others think that with the development of high-speed railway, train travel has greatly improved."
 
"Perhaps due to reports of shabby, overcrowded trains some years ago,the impression still lingers with many people," he added.
 
Feng Yan, 31, is a big fan of railways and has by far traveled more than 220,000 kilometers by train in over 20 countries, including 140,000 kilometers in China; almost the whole Chinese railway network.
 
He once took Train No.6417 from Beijing' s downtown area to Chengde in Hebei Province three years ago during the rush. "What impressed me most was that water was fetched from old-fashioned coal-fired device, and the trainman sang to sell snacks. That really attracted me."
 
Feng believes that chunyun greatly changed with the coming of high-speed railways. "The high-speed trains hold more passengers and run much faster, and the environment on the train is much better."
 
Feng created a website called "TrackingChina" in 2010 to help English-speaking passengers get to know China' s railways. He also updates corrections of 'Chinglish' illustrations found in railway stations around the country every day through Sina Weibo, one of China's most popular micro-blogging sites, to prevent them from misleading foreign passengers.
 
He suggests railway stations improve their ticketing services, as the ticket machines can only identify the ID card but not the passport. "Many countries have adopted the QR code ticket. You just have to scan the code to have your ticket checked. This would save time of queuing to get tickets."