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Published: November 15th 2011
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We got the high speed train from Beijing on Wednesday which took a little less than 5 hours and was pure comfort. Each carriage shows the speed the train is going and we hit a top speed of 311km/hour. The high speed train was introduced in July and there have been some minor teething problems to say the least. Two trains collided a couple of months back resulting in a number of fatalities and some of the trains were recalled due to technical faults. Nevertheless we took our chances rather than taking the alternative 14 hour train.
Shanghai is quite different to Beijing. It was the first we saw of people begging. Women carrying babies on the train bow in front of you. It's fairly sad. The city is almost like two cities. You can see the contrast in the photos of our hotel view and the other part of the city where the financial district is located (Skyline photo). On the streets beside us people are selling chickens whereas across the river in the financial district it feels like you are in another American city, a bigger version with millions of Chinese! There are two malls that are bigger
than anything I've seen over in the U.S. And all the American chains are located there, McDonalds, Starbucks etc. The streets have the best of cars. It was good to see both sides.
We spent our last day in Shanghai at the YuYuan gardens, over 400 years old and characteristic of the Ming Dynasty, which were very tranquil. The tranquility was dampened by a slight incident when we were leaving that part of Shanghai to get the metro back to the hotel to get our bags and head off to Xian. On the walk to the metro I spotted some scam artists (a couple dressed in the best of clothes) running their scam on a middle aged white man. I think he was from the UK. We were familiar with the scam which had been attempted on us 3 times already since we arrived in China. A couple, either a guy and a girl or two girls, come up to you all nice and ask “where are you from” and then skillfully lull you into a false sense of security asking for pictures with you etc.. Their end goal is to get you to join them for tea and
you get hit with a $200 bill with heavy muscle guarding the way out. They are fluent in many languages and each time it was attempted on us the same script was followed. We didn’t fall for it and so when I saw it happening to this guy I shouted over “ignore them, they are scam artists”. Aoife asked me not to say anything else in case they were not actually scam artists. I knew they were so I sat right next to where they were taking the picture of the ‘white man’. Hearing what I said and then having me sit there was enough for them to move on in the opposite direction. We walked in the same direction as the unsuspecting tourist towards our metro back to the hotel. 5 minutes later the male scam artist was in my face asking “what I was looking at”, ‘’why are you looking at me’’ in a fairly aggressive manner. A few words were exchanged. Rather than push it further I just ignored him to which he called me “strange” which I think is funny. There was nothing to be gained by getting in a fight with the dirty rat scam
artist. His threat that ‘he knew people’ also seemed real and I didn’t want to find out if it was or not. They are definitely part of a bigger criminal organisation training them in many languages, educating them about different countries and training them in fraudulent salesmanship. Triads maybe? 😊
The whole experience put a dampener on the Chinese experience and I was happy to be getting out of Shanghai. It also served as a bit of a warning not to be as trusting of people. Anyway we made for the train to Xian to view the famous Terracotta warrior excavation. It's a 14 hour train and we've bought 'soft sleeper tickets' which means we have a bed each in a 4 bed cabin. I'm praying we get two people that are not too weird and don’t spit too much! The lad beside us on the fancy high speed train spat on the floor of the train and rubbed it in with his shoe. Manky!!!
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