The next three blog entries cover our activities from this past weekend. The event that prompted the weekend in Shanghai was the Shanghai Marathon in which Tony and a few friends from the neighborhood ran.
The first adventure of the weekend came with our transportation. We decided to take the train to Shanghai rather than using one of the Caterpillar drivers and vans
Visiting the Suzhou train station was a real experience with the mass of humanity that is China. The station was pleasantly well organized with trains labelled in English as well as Chinese. The queues were reasonably orderly, though queuing up in China is always chaotic by comparison to the U.S. However, the station was extremely crowded and very dirty. Most notably, in the waiting room for the train, I watched a woman holding her one-year-old child while the boy dropped a No. 2 onto a newspaper on the floor.
Once on the train, life was pleasant. The seats were like airplane seats and each of us had an assigned seat. Tickets were fairly inexpensive at $6 U.S. round-trip.
Our thought was to take the train and save some time versus the drive to Shanghai. The car trip can take anywhere from 1.5 to 3.5 hours by car depending on traffic and the express train is only 35 minutes. However, once you add in the rides to and from the train station and extra time to wait for the train, our total time door-to-door ended up being around three hours - not much improvement over driving.
No comments:
Post a Comment