We’re off to Tianjin today for a couple of days – Beijing has a lot to offer, but it’ll be good to see another city, and fun to go on the bullet train and whizz about 300km/h across the country...
… in the back of my mind, however, is that recent train crash with the same rolling stock. I’m not sure it was the same line, but may well have been.
Beijing South Station is like an airport and extremely busy. You really need to have a basic understanding of how to speak/read some Mandarin to get tickets - there's not much in the way of English on the indicator boards for which train is going where, so Adrian buys the train tickets.
That said, I am sure that if I said ‘sān Tianjin’ then
we’d have got three tickets to Tianjin. Probably. Weirdly, you need to have your passport to buy train tickets - I am told this is to stop you buying more than 1 ticket per person and then selling them on for a profit, but I am not so convinced this is the real reason...
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| wheeeeeee! |
Even better, we get the VIP class tickets for the journey, which means we
get a compartment away form everyone else with loads of room for luggage etc. Probably totally unnecessary, but I
like this style of travelling (and it cost £9).
We keep an eye on the LED that displays the speed the train is going - and it gets up to 285 km/h, so about 150km and about thirty minutes later we are
pulling into Tianjin Station, which looks even bigger than Beijing South Station!
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