New day, new city

Not quite. It took all day to get here and I only got to wander around in the evening. So here’s Shanghai’s river front in all its neon glory.

The bullet trains are great. Xi’an to Shanghai: more than 1300km in 6 hours, travelling for large parts of the journey at 300km an hour. The non-bullet trains take between 15 and 20 hours. The last time I came to China, I didn’t go to the north because it would have taken several days on the train and I didn’t want to use up my precious days on trains. And at that time I was much more afraid of flying and I didn’t want to take internal flights! There are new high speed train stations for the bullet trains. They are more like airports than train stations. Xi’an station is on the scale of an airport and you have to wait at the gate before being allowed to board the train.

Snow is covering a large part of northern China. The view from the train window was mostly snowy until about an hour out of Shanghai. I saw lots of farmland and quite a lot of grim looking industrial towns and cities before arriving to the bright lights of Shanghai.