The lady in the ticket office at Jinju Hutong metro station told us that we needed to go to Beijing West mainline station to get the high-speed train to Shanghai. A friendly girl told us how to get the Beijing Dong (West) metro station; we had a map but the Beijing metro is so huge that we couldn’t find the station we needed. When we got to Beijing West, the ticket office girl told us the train leaves from Beijing South. However she could book us two tickets to Shanghai but we couldn’t pay for them because her card reader was too big to fit under the screen protecting her from irate passengers. So we got the metro to the Beijing Nan (South) station where we bought the tickets for Shanghai. The train journey took 6 hours, but was very comfortable because we bought first-class tickets. The landscape south of Beijing is flat as a pancake with every single square inch cultivated. The small fields were growing green vegetables but with the train travelling at nearly 300 mph it was hard to see what they were. There were numerous rivers, canals and ponds being used for irrigation. Towards Nanjing there was range of low hills covered in trees and then extensive paddy fields. On reaching the infamous Hong Qiao railway station, where we lost each other last year, we got the No.2 metro line straight to the Jing An Temple. Unable to find the Yangfeng hotel where we stayed last year, we found the Paramount hotel which is paramount in every way and got a room on the 18th floor with an incredible view of Shanghai.
Colonel Mao Zedong Sanders at Beijing South
Beijing South. Every bit as huge as Shanghai Hongqiao
A Beijing suburb
A fleet of bullet trains at Hangzhou station
Mountains near Nanjing
Nanjing, where 300,000 Chinese were massacred by the Japanese in 1937
Paddy fields
Hongqiao station where I went to look for a restaurant last year and couldn’t find Jennifer when I got back. Spent 6 hours looking for her until the police found me.
Jing An Temple, Shanghai
Illuminated trees in Jing An district
The Temple
The view from our room