On Saturday, we boarded the bullet train and headed north to Beijing (pop. 11,700,000). It's a two hour flight, or a 4-1/2 hour train ride in a comfy seat. Our train seated 1,000 passengers and ran at 190 mph with only a few stops. It rocked!
There are about 50 of these Shanghai to Beijing trains that run every day. That's 50,000 people a day! We really need to get serious about making hi-speed rail a reality in the US.
Our sunny blue skies disappeared as we neared Nanjing (pop. 7,200,000) where they're still burning coal. This is how everywhere was the past two times I visited.
There's a food car on the train that serves up some pretty tasty train TV dinners.
After we cleared Nanjing, it was blue skies and sunshine all the way to Beijing. (Chinese lesson: Nan means south, Bei means north, and jing means capital. Nanjing was the southern capital of China before it was moved to Beijing).
The countryside looks not too different from our countryside, except that all the fields are small plots. There are no 640 acre fields. Same goes for large ag equipment - everything is done manually or with small powered equipment. This has allowed the rural population to remain intact.
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