Another shot of the South Beijing Railway Station.
After spending a week back at work, the Golden Week holidays arrived and we decided to head down to Tianjin to see our dear friend, Nuria.
We bought the train tickets about 4 days ago and love that we can buy tickets, on a High Speed Train, so easily and so cheaply, whenever we want.
The tickets cost us about 60RMB each, or about 10 USD to go 150 kilometers on the fastest possible train in China.
That is really pretty cool.
The only problem with traveling in China during the October Golden Week Holiday is that about 150,000,000 of my closest friends are also traveling at that time.
Just for information’s sake, Golden Week is the world’s largest human migration.
And it happens every single year.
The actual number may be more around 200,000,000 but whose counting 50,000,000 people?
The trip was actually amazingly easy and we have to guess that most of the Chinese nationals actually traveled the night before and were already heading to their destinations.
It was still pretty busy, and there were lots of people, but it wasn’t the insane crowding and pushing we’ve seen on movies and videos.
The train ride down was great and incredibly smooth.
After we got off the train we found our friend Nuria and hopped on the subway.
We then grabbed a cab to her apartment and had a delicious lunch that she made based on Spanish dishes that mixed in some yummy Chinese foods also.
As we’ve learned, you make do, and make your own recipes, when living in China since so much of what we are used to isn’t available.
It is one of the joys of being an expatriate because you learn to make new things and live outside the box.
We also had a Chinese sparkling wine with lunch and were surprised at how it tasted. It was a bit too sweet but, overall, was drinkable and an excellent value at 28RMB (about $5 USD). One can’t argue with that when having a fun meal with a dear friend.