The World’s fastest trains

Train numbers in China tell you how fast they are. The fastest trains are the G-class (photo above), which means that the train number will start with a G. We took a G train from Shanghai to Hangzhou, but this distance is so short that we did not feel this was one of the world’s fastest trains.

Today we took a G train from Beijing to Xi’an and were really impressed. The distance between these two cities is 1122 Kms, a shade less than the distance between Mumbai and Delhi (which is 1421 Kms). The fastest train connection between Mumbai and Delhi takes 16 hours. We took 5 hours from Beijing to Xi’an! The train made four stops in between, and its top speed was 306 Km/hr. If we had trains like this in India then we could go from Mumbai to Delhi in six and a half hours, less than half the time it now takes. If G-trains ran in India, Ahmedabad would be a little over 2 hours from Mumbai, making it a commutable distance. Someone living in Ahmedabad could dash to Mumbai for a business lunch.

Other fast trains which I’ve travelled by are the TGV from Paris to Marseilles, the German ICE 4 from Cologne to Berlin, and Japan’s Shinkansen between Hiroshima and Tokyo. They are all pretty impressive, but the Chinese Harmony beats them all in the smoothness of travel. I could walk along the train without feeling any sway or jerk. The train would accelerate into and out of stations smoothly. When I looked down to read, there was no haptic clue that I was on a train. My plastic bottle of water stayed firmly on its tray even after it was empty. This is what trains of the future will feel like.

A long lunch

China is going through an anti-corruption drive. One of the ways it manifests itself is that the large official lunches are no longer paid for. Instead you pay for your own lunch; as one of my colleagues said, "no free lunch". This does not mean that the meal is substantially smaller. In the photos alongside you can see some of the things that we had one day. The incomplete description refers to chicken. Through whatsapp The Family has already told my cousins and hers about the donkey that I ate for lunch. The nicest comment to come back was "he is brave". The slices of donkey meat were served cold in a soya sauce, and did not taste very exotic.

The unfortunate outcome of the new government policy is that you no longer have lunch with your youngest colleagues because they prefer to go to a corner noodle shop, where the price of lunch is about half of what we pay. Maybe we should start doing that just for the pleasure of getting to know everyone at work.

No coffee in Olympus

When we emerged from the subway to the promenade of the Olympic Green, I wanted some coffee. There were a couple of convenience stores near the exit, but no hot coffee. We walked further: a ticket office with cold drinks, but no coffee. The promenade was lined with kiosks selling cold drinks and sausages, but no coffee. Eventually we settled on the most popular drink in the place, which was yogurt out of a pot (see the photo).

We saw many families out together: parents, child, and one or two grandparents. Often one of the adults could be seen carrying a big bag of food. The drinks would come from the kiosks.

Over the next few days we discovered that this was one of the differences between Shanghai and Beijing. Shanghai has coffee everywhere, but the main tourist spots in Beijing have no coffee. In this Beijing is more representative of China. Coffee is largely imported, and costs much more than tea.

A first walk in Beijing

The first working day in Beijing was shot because of our late arrival the previous night. I woke in time to get a few things done in the morning, but felt sleepy all afternoon. Finally, I decided to call it a day at four. This is not too early by Beijing standards, where people go to work early, so creating traffic jams at 5 in the morning, and leave a little after five.

Instead of falling asleep at an odd hour we decided to go for a walk at the Olympic plaza. Everyone alive probably remembers the iconic stadiums as a TV staple during the 2008 Beijing olympics: the bird’s nest (above) and the water cube (below). If you look at travel photos at all, you will find wonderful shots of these structures aglow with lights at night. Looking at these photos I’d wondered whether the structures look equally good during the day. Here was our opportunity to check it out.

We reached a couple of hours before sunset. The vast and windy plaza was full of people. We walked up the plaza to the stadia. They looked beautiful in the light of the setting sun. The bird’s nest is to the east of the plaza, and is illuminated by the sun as it sets. The water cube is to the west, and the setting sun shines through it. Ai Weiwei, the chinese artist, apparently was retained by the architectural firm of Herzog et de Meuron to advise on the design of the bird’s nest. The water cube is a marvel of modern architecture, especially in its use of innovative materials. The two were placed together to reflect traditional Chinese cosmology, so the east-west orientation of the two must be planned.

We will go back again to photograph them at night. The Family also wants to go inside. With my daily schedule, I may not be able to go with her.

A quirky sight

When you travel for pleasure it is usually because you want to see something different: different people, different sights. So it is for me. It is delightful when I see something which I have not seen before.

On our first walk through Beijing we saw the wonderful sight of a line of kites flying together. That’s not something we are used to in India: where kites are flown as a competitive sport. Each person who flies kites tries to cut down others. A long time ago, when I was a school boy, I would spend hours planning the mixture of glue and finely ground glass which would be coated on kite strings to enable them to cut others. The sight of a line of kites floating serenely above us was a quirky sight, which brought smiles to our faces.

We followed the line down with our eyes, and found that it was an advertisement attached to a little food stall! What a lovely idea, we said to each other. China invented kites after all, it stands to reason that they would have had centuries to think of uses for them.

The Family said, “Would they know that we have a kite festival day in India?” I don’t know. Perhaps that thought could bring a smile to Chinese faces.

From Shanghai to Beijing

In the few days that we stayed in Shanghai we grew to love the atmosphere of the city: it seemed like a lively place where people are getting on with their lives and having fun. The bones and arteries of the city, the transport system and the roads, are good, and the people are really friendly. It is the kind of city in which a foreigner can live for a few years and like it.

The next part of our trip is Beijing. We took a late evening flight. It was delayed by almost an hour. In India such a delay would have set people talking, many passengers would have gone to the gate and asked for the reason for the delay, and there would be several announcements giving more and more detailed reasons. In Shanghai people did not seem to bother. The quiet was nice. We took out our Kindles and read quietly.

We’d had a long day, so I fell asleep almost as soon as we took off. I woke up some time later to find the crew serving drinks. I had a tea and read about Beijing. The Family did not bother to wake up until we were about to land. The landing was beautiful: a feather-light landing which is so uncommon now. The night was a little chill, but we had our sweaters. There was another major delay at the baggage reclaim. It was past midnight, and we had to wait for nearly an hour for the baggage to arrive. Again I was surprised by the patience of my Chinese co-passengers. India is different.

It hadn’t been easy to flag taxis in either Shanghai or Hangzhou. Beijing airport turned out to be more organized. We were in a queue, and as taxis arrived, they would take the passengers at the head of the queue. We were in a taxi soon, luggage stowed away, and showed the driver the address of the hotel in Chinese. He spoke a few words of English. I remember reading in the newspapers that before the Beijing olympics taxi drivers had been given lessons in English. Were we reaping the benefits of that?

We are going to spend the next month in the Haidian district where there is a cluster of universities and high-tech companies. Late at night the taxi took about thirty minutes to get to our hotel from the airport. We found how impressive this was the very next morning, when I met a friend who took the shuttle bus at five in the morning and was stuck in traffic for two hours.

As we tried to check in late at night, the lady at the reception told us that we did not have reservations. I was nonplussed: I’d called up the hotel at four in the afternoon and told them we would arrive after midnight, and they had assured us that they would hold our reservation. It was sorted out minutes later, when the lady discovered that she had mistyped my name. It was three at night when we finally looked out at Beijing from our room 50 meters above ground.

The turning of the wheel

The Jing’an temple is a large and beautiful temple in the middle of Shanghai, and is probably high on every tourist’s list of things to do. It turned out that this was almost the last thing we did during our stay in Shanghai. When we came back to Shanghai from our trip to Hangzhou, we took the metro to Jing’an. It was well past noon, and as we emerged from the metro station into the food court of a large departmental store, we stopped for lunch. We had the noodle soup which had become the mainstay of our lunches, but then got snagged by the many sweet shops around. We emerged near the entrance of the temple loaded with boxes of Chinese sweets.

The entrance to the temple is marked by a huge column topped by a brass copy of the lion capital of Sarnath. This was the symbol of the first Indian empire: the Maurya empire of the 4th century BCE, the same empire that adopted Buddhism as a state religion and then exported it to the world. Interestingly, over two thousand years of separate cultural evolution, the lion capital has remained a symbol of the state in India, but become a symbol of the Buddhist religion in China! We sat near the base of the symbol of our nation, and tried out the sweets. Chinese sweets are completely different from the Indian variety: they are not so sweet (sugar was, after all, one of the technologies that India gave to the world), and they have interesting but mild flavours. They look like Japanese mochi or daifuku, but the ones we had were not made of rice and beans.

We paid our entrance fees and entered into the usual chaos of a temple in China: incense, monks in BMWs, lots of young people praying, and children donating money. We passed through this into the side chapels on the ground floor. One was made of camphor wood. The carving was beautiful. We walked up the imposing staircase to the main temple with its immense bronze Buddha. While crossing the Himalaya, the Buddha turned from an emaciated ascetic (bhikshu) into a well-fed god. Behind the imposing statue was a large fresco telling the story of Gautama, the Buddha. The four main sections were his birth and encounter with the misery of life, the enlightenment, the sermon of the turning of the wheel, and the mahaparinirvana.

We walked on to a corridor which flanks the main temple, and goes round it to the drum and bell towers with a chapel to the Maitreya Bodhisattva, shown, as always in China, as the laughing Buddha. The temple and towers are dwarfed by the high-rise buildings around it, but the glitter and ornamentation seems to outshine these newer buildings.

Ordering food in China

Two things about ordering food in restaurants in China take getting used to.

The first is that you order everything together. There is no real distinction between appetizer and the main dishes. You choose all that you think you will find edible, order it, and it will arrive as it gets ready: do not expect appetizers to arrive first. We reconciled it with our Indian experience by thinking of a Gujarati thali, where again, everything arrives in any order whatever, and you can go back and forth. Exactly like that, in Chinese restaurants, the rice is more or less the end of the meal.

The second is when to pay. In some restaurants you get a bill at the end of the meal. In some, especially the smaller establishments, you order and pay and then find a table for yourself; only then should you even expect the food to arrive. There is also the third method: the food and the bill arrive together, and you pay before you begin to tuck in to the meal. We do see all three methods in India, the problem is that our expectation of which restaurant will use which method is wildly off.

That’s cultural differences for you.

M50 art district

M50 on Moganshan Lu in Shanghai is a collection of galleries, studios and spaces which house art and art projects. I was afraid I would never find it without google maps, but then I searched the web and someone on Tripadvisor had left precise and accurate instructions on how to reach this place. We arrived at noon and had a quick lunch at one of the cafes before starting in.

China has a thriving art scene, and M50 gives you a quick cross-section of the work being done. Quite a bit of it is not new, but there were gems tucked away in several of the galleries. In the middle of a gallery with very decorative colourful canvases I was blown away by three incredible abstracts.

Paintings were only one of the many kinds of media on display. There was also a large amount of porcelain. Some of it used older techniques, but there were some pieces which used the new high-temperature glazes: some of these colours are brilliant. I had an interesting chat with one of the artists about techniques and kilns. There was a time when I’d wanted to learn ceramics, but discovered that it was hard to get time on kilns in Mumbai. This conversation made me wonder whether it would be worthwhile establishing a small kiln at home.

We walked through a maze of lanes and wandered into a small cafe which had a barista doing great artwork in cappuccino. As we sat there and destroyed her performance art, we saw a fashion shoot in progress. I did some ambush shooting during this (see photo above). Art districts involve all kinds of things.

My current off-work passion is photography. This seems to be a small niche in M50. We walked into a studio which called itself “The Dark Room”. It was manned by a crew of enthusiastic youngsters (see the featured photo) who showed me their dark room behind the shop. This brought back nostalgic memories of my school days when I was associated with a bunch of others in maintaining a small dark room in a little attic in the school. This had the same enlargers, development tanks, baths of developers and fixers. The kids spoke good English and we had a long enthusiasts’ chat about our first cameras which left The Family with glazed eyes. The kids had never heard of the camera models I started with. That’s a generation gap for you!

Back in the shop we saw some lovely prints. These are by the master photographer who is training the youngsters. We bought a couple of them: they seem to transfer the sensibility and aesthetics of chinese painting successfully into this modern medium. I would love to keep them on my wall and look at them again and again.

Connecting

As soon as we met in the evening, The Family told me about yesterday’s quake in Nepal. She was on whatsapp with my cousin’s wife in the US, who was, in turn, worried about my aunt, her mother-in-law, who was spending some time with another cousin in Patna. In China our first source of news is the TV. We switched it on and saw what few visuals are available with CNN. This and HBO are the two channels we watch occasionally, because the other channels are in Putonghua, which we do not understand.

Our access to the net from China is severely limited. Yahoo news is available. We looked at the news from India through this. Some low-bandwidth VPN gave us access to a trickle of other sources of news. This is a really bad time for the Nepali people, and the Indians who live in the plains just below.

What can we do for Nepal this time around?