February 19, 2016

Well, I’m glad that we visited Shanghai, but we have a timeline and have to be moving on. This morning, we left the hotel early and rode over to Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station, where Iris walked us inside, helped us buy tickets, and left us at our gate. This railway station is the largest railway station in Asia and home to a high-speed bullet train that we’d be taking from Shanghai down to the capital of Luna’s providence, Hangzhou, Zhejiang. Hangzhou, as a place, first appears in records about 5,000 years ago and has been of some importance for most of that time. K-Man has been endlessly excited about doing this and I don’t think that I really appreciated it. In September 2010, a test train on the Shanghai-Hangzhou high-speed line achieved a speed of 416.6 km/h (259 mph) setting a Chinese train speed record. You can check out Wikipedia for more information.

Shanghai Hongqia Railway Station

It's not even lunch but Q-Boo is exhausted and I am trying to take everything in.

I loved to travel by air or rail, inside of China. I always felt like, any other time, that we were kind of being shown what they wanted us to see.  On the train, my eyes barely left the window because it felt like I was getting a small, behind the scenes, look at the "real" China.

“300 kilometers per hour! That’s 186 miles per hour! This is the fastest I’ve ever gone, I mean, on land. Is this the fastest that you’ve ever gone on land?” - I mean, really, part of what I love about K-Man is his endless enthusiasm and sense of adventure. 

"No, babe. I was once part of a camel race…." -I mean, really, part of what he loves about me is my endless sense of sarcasm. 

In Hangzhou the sky was the same as it was in Shanghai- low, grey, and smoggy- except that I worked really hard to believe that I did see a slight blue tint.

We were met by another guide in Hangzhou and, on the way to the hotel from the train station,  she mentioned to us that we were passing over a canal that was dug 1500 years ago. The canal took 3 million people to dig and was stretched from Beijing to Hangzhou, a distance of over 800 miles. To me, this was comparable to the Great Wall, but I’d never heard of it. This is China- the old, the new, the modern, the ancient, all thrown together and existing side by side. The canal joined other local canals that were dug about 500 years before that. I remember thinking, “At home I am impressed with something that is 100 years old. With a flick of her wrist she says ‘1500 years old.’ “

We are such a young country and culture.

Our home while in Hangzhou.

Our view.