Monday 9/23, after conceding defeat on my ATM card, we took public transportation back to the Beijing West Railway Station.  I ate a spicy chicken sandwich, two orders of fries, and 2 large gulps of an icy Coca Cola from the McDonald’s before realizing I should not be drinking anything with ice.  Hopefully that one does not come back and bite me.

Here’s a panoramic photo of the hectic train station before we passed through the gates onto the platform.  Newsflash: a lot of people live in China.

With Beijing in our rear view mirror and shrinking fast we finally started to relax.  Just 1100 km in 6 hours (187 mph).  Nicole nodded off while I set to work fixing our Picasa photo album timedate stamps from Japan.

Note: If you want to keep “date picture taken” tags correct relative to where you took them, you need to 1) set your camera time / timezone / daylight saving time correctly, 2) set your computer’s time correctly, and 3) make sure any friends you’re traveling with have done the same if you plan to import their pictures.  Somehow, Kelly’s camera was off by 13 hours, 35 minutes?  And somehow most of our pictures had been imported as duplicates even though the “exclude duplicates” option was set?

Our train ride was very smooth and smoke-free while in motion.  At each of the 8 stops or so along the way, everyone would step outside for a cigarette or two and let that smell carry into the cabin.  There is certainly a tobacco addiction problem in this country.  More so than what we’ve experienced in Europe and in Japan.  Everyone smokes everywhere.  The non-smoking signs in restaurants and subway stations are merely a suggestion.  The non-smoking hostels/hotel rooms seem to be rotated daily.

Some of the scenery along the ride:

Power Plants:

Rice fields:

Construction projects:

The construction projects tended to dominate the landscape.  It went like this: farmland – farmland – incomplete high rise apartment complex – farmland – farmland…  It was very eerie, reminiscent of frontier ghost towns.  Almost every construction project was about the same height, ranging from 4-20 buildings, and the same amount of incompleteness, although at least a few workers and cranes could always be spotted on them.  There were dozens and dozens of these clusters across the rural landscape.  It makes me wonder if much of the housing boom is just a front –> luring investors into grand plans of new cities full of people and marketplaces, just to fall short of being complete.  It could also be that these projects were all started at the same time (within the last 1-2 years) and are progressing well — hard to tell.

For now, I choose to view this rural landscape as being sprinkled with building carcasses.

I don’t think we passed this, but we may as well have: China’s Abandoned Disneyworld Knockoff

PS, Happy Birthday Grandpa!  I hope you enjoy the Corvette I sent you from Japan (picture of) – Maybe they can be picked up at the local Wu-Mart in Beijing too…