The Fast Train from Beijing to Luoyang

I mentioned my dream about missing my train.  Well, of course I got up early to leave plenty of time, and got to the station about 2 hours early.  I was planning to take the subway (the closest stop is pretty close to the train station) however once I got outside with all my packs I decided to heck with it and hailed a cab.  Even so, it was almost an hour door-to-door by the time I got to Beijing West, the Biggest Train Station in Asia.  (Everything here is The Biggest.)

(By the way, the taxi driver had a lot of problems understanding where I wanted to go, even though you would think "bei jing xi zhan" would be pretty easy to understand.  "I don't understand," he said to me.  "Huo che zhan, bei jing xi," I repeated.  "Oh!  Bei jing XI."  Sheesh, all these lessons and I can't even pronounce "xi", which means "West" and is one of the first words you learn in Chinese.)

The train looks like it's from outer space.  It's top speed today was 306 km/h.

Here are some pics from the trip:

Two things to say about these pics: (1) pollution, and (2) construction boom.

(1) Pollution.  Remember "污染" ("wu ran")?  Well the wu ran got thicker and thicker, until by the time we got to Luoyang it was just a thick grey fog blanketing just about everything.  Do these people never see the sun in this part of the world?  It's depressing!  The Luoyang'ers weren't even wearing pollution masks, I think I saw maybe one or two people on scooters wearing masks but that's it.  You hear a lot about pollution counts in Beijing, but that's only because the US Embassy is publishing the figures.  In the rest of the country the government isn't going to say.  But I can tell you that in Luoyang today it was much worse than I've ever experienced in Beijing, even on the day it hit 310.

(2) Construction Boom.  There are massive numbers of apartment blocks everywhere in China, and in pretty much every city we passed through on the train, massive numbers of new buildings being constructed.  In some cases new blocks of 10 or more buildings are being constructed.  I lost count of the number of cranes and number of new buildings we passed.  Are they really expecting that much growth?  Or are they preparing for some kind of massive migration in the future?  There is no signs of any kind of economic slowdown in China!

And finally, a pic of me with one of my seatmates from the trip.  No big deal :-)

His (or her) mom was helping me with my Chinese characters during the trip, so I helped while she was packing up at her stop :-)

In my next post I'll talk about Luoyang, my shitty hotel (sorry for the language but there's no mincing words on this one), the shitty quality of the air here (sorry again) and my adventures talking to the locals!  (I think I'm the only foreigner in town right now, and possibly the only one ever.  And I'll be happy if I can find even one local who's ever heard of Canada.)