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| We had yet to pick up our tickets, and the train schedule board and long lines were a bit intimidating. |
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| There are two railway stations in Beijing, and they are every bit as huge, and clean, and orderly, and efficient, as the PEK Int'l airport. China has moving 1.3 billion people down to a science. No, seriously. |
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| Let's get this show on the road! (um, rail :/ ) |
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| Free at last! Free at last! Thank God, Almighty, we are free at last!! |
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| And this was home for the next five hours :) |
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| Traveling at nearly 200mph, (306km) yet the ride was as smooooooth and as quiet as can be, except for the fact that the Chinese are as noisy as can be. |
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| Even our neighbor was a bit noisy trying to find his happy place. He pulled out his prayer book three times on the trip. |
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| The changing landscape as we left Beijing; it became very flat and we passed by several nuclear power plants. |
So, we are off school on Monday as it is the three day QingMing Tomb Sweeping Festival. The intent of the festival is to visit your ancestor's graves, and give them a proper cleaning. Then the family gathers 'round with food and drink, and they burn fake money and pictures of 'essentials' like cell phones, clothing, shoes, music, and such- so that their loved ones are comfortable, happy, and prosperous in the afterlife. Here's a great news article with some stunning photos of the festivities throughout the country of China. It is quite a lavish and time honored affair. Tomb sweeping
As I gazed out my window seat at the countryside, I was marveled by three things...
One, we were clearly in agricultural country, but there were no super sized farming operations with no super sized farming equipment. All of the land was divided into small plots, and those plots were worked by people wielding hand tools. I saw just one small lawn tractor that had a single plow blade to turn the dirt. Other than that, individual people were working their individual plots. To think the country feeds 1.3 billion people in this way?! I was also curious as to where these people live, and how they came by their small plots of land. I assume they are government issued, but I don't really know. There were some poor, rundown villages in the area, but for the most part, there were bicycles in the fields that the peasants had pedaled on to get to their plot. A tough way to make a living, for sure.
The second thing I noticed was even though this was the QingMing Tomb Sweeping Festival, we only whizzed by two small cemeteries with tombs or headstones. Where do they bury their dead???
And then, about half way through the trip, I realized the answer. They were buried in unmarked graves, in their garden plots. How did I know this? I kept seeing piles of dirt, mounded up like a pyramid, scattered here and there in the garden plots. Then, I saw that many of them had peasants raking, piling up, and smoothing the dirt piles. A bit later, I saw many of the mounds of dirt had flowers placed around them. Eventually, I saw some piles of dirt with small fires smoldering, and that is when I knew: Grandma and Grandpa were buried in the garden :/ I tried many times to get pictures of the dirt piles with flowers and fires, but traveling at 200mph made it impossible. I had at least twenty pics of blur that I deleted.
The third thing I marveled at (and I noticed this in Sanya Beach, South China as well) is ALL of the abandoned buildings, and ALL of the high rises under construction with cranes all around them. There was one abandoned home, village, apartment building, warehouse, and factory after another. And for every abandoned one, there was another nearby under construction. Where do all the people go in the mean time? I can only speculate. The countryside looked post-apocalyptic, outside of the occasional peasant working his plot of land. It was eerie to say the least.
Five hours and nearly 1000 miles to the south, (I didn't know there's palm trees in Shanghai!) we rolled in to another mega-city. By population, Shanghai is even bigger than Beijing, China's capital city. It is a port city, and a staging point for travel and trade throughout South East Asia. At 24 million people +, Shanghai is three times larger than New York City. It is eight times larger then our second largest city, which is Los Angeles. You cannot appreciate the vastness of China, and the amount of people in China, until you enter a crowded train station, and then ride the rail across country. To think I haven't begun to travel further east yet, to any of the other 30+ provinces. It's plain crazy talk....to say China is HUGE, and densely populated, is a gross understatement. (Ironically, I just checked out the total land area of the People's Republic of China, and it ranks fourth behind Russia, Canada, and the United States, respectively. Oops; I stand corrected, lol!) If you want to know more, check it out: largest country
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| By the time we hailed a cab, found the apartment, and got settled, we were more than ready for Friday Night Pizza Night :) We feasted ourselves to shore up for two full days of marathon sightseeing and shopping. With a game plan all mapped out for the coming days, it was time to call it a night. |
G'nite, y'all!
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