10/10/10 reminds me of 08/08/08

Bird's Nest

Today is October 10, 2010 or 10/10/10, and I’m reminded of 08/08/08 or August 8, 2008, the day the Beijing Olympics opened.

I wasn’t there during the event itself, but the following year I was able to visit the Bird’s Nest, where the opening ceremony was held.

I saw it sometime in May 2009 though, and not on 09/09/09.

Behind me is the Water Cube and around my neck is a fake Olympic gold medal

Valentine’s Day and Chinese New Year fall on the same day in 2010

In Shanghai, China. Pic taken in April 2009, two months after the Chinese New Year

Both Valentine’s Day and the first day of the Chinese New Year will be celebrated on February 14.

I do recognize that not everyone cares about Valentine’s Day and not all people are Chinese.

But I’m sure there are many people who are really looking forward to celebrating the Day of Love.

And more than a billion of this planet’s inhabitants are Chinese. Add to that number those who are not Chinese, but follow some Chinese traditions.

Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China

How would people who have both characteristics spend that day? Especially the ones in China itself?

I can already see lots of fireworks.

Unusual building in Beijing

The CCTV building is located in Beijing's central business district

It wasn’t a part of our guided tour in Beijing, but I strongly believe that anyone who visits the Chinese capital should see it.

The China Central Television (CCTV) headquarters building in Beijing is the strangest edifice I’ve ever seen.

While the Bird’s Nest, the site of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, is also an unusual structure in the sense that it’s not your ordinary-looking sports stadium, the CCTV building takes oddity to a higher level.

The site of the 2008 Olympiad can be described easily as a “bird’s nest.” What about the CCTV headquarters? It defies simple description and explanation.

Unfortunately we didn’t have enough time to come closer to the CCTV building. In a few minutes we had to go back to the train station for our return trip to Shanghai.

We just viewed it from somewhere near the entrance to the Guomao Station of the Beijing Subway.

Even from afar, the odd structure was a sight to behold.

China train travel thrills me

The train journey between China’s two biggest cities – Shanghai and Beijing – was an amazing experience for me. A railway spanning almost 1,500 kilometers is nonexistent in my home country.

It’s only in the movies and TV shows where I see train trips covering thousands of kilometers.

A very long train travel is an alien concept in the Philippines, as it lacks the large and contiguous territory of China, Europe and the US.

Because of that, I didn’t know that such train journeys were so much fun. Until my mother and I went to China.

Shanghai

On top of the agenda on our first full day in Shanghai was to book tickets for the train travel from Shanghai to Beijing.

I bought the tickets in the city itself because I was afraid to buy them online for various reasons.

The Chinese characters on some of the book-your-train-tickets-online sites made me feel unwelcome.

Trust was another issue. I was reluctant to disclose some of my personal and credit card information to those sites.

The main reason, however, was that my research showed the existence of several train stations in both Shanghai and Beijing. Passengers must make sure that they’ve bought tickets for a train departing from a specific station.

I found it too confusing, so I decided to just buy the tickets in the train station itself.

Shanghai to Beijing train

We had “soft-seater” tickets for the train journey from Shanghai to Beijing. We left at 9:31 PM.

I was seated between my mother and a woman in her late 50s or early 60s.

Even though I just sat for the entire duration of the 10 to 11-hour trip, I considered it almost perfectly comfortable.

“Almost” because the woman on my left side kept coughing, which really made me uneasy.

She even made me more uncomfortable when she spat phlegm into a tissue, which she then placed on the tray table in front of her.

First day in Beijing

I saw our tour guide about half an hour after our arrival at the train station in Beijing. He immediately asked if we already had train tickets for the return trip to Shanghai.

Since we hadn’t bought our tickets yet, he accompanied me to the ticket booth where he found out that there were only two kinds of tickets left: “standing” and “soft-sleeper.”

I knew that soft-sleepers were the most expensive train tickets, but I opted for them because I didn’t want to stand for about 10 to 11 hours at night inside a train filled with strangers in a foreign land.

Our tour guide laughed a bit.

He said the prices of those train tickets were almost the same as those of the plane tickets for the domestic flight between Beijing and Shanghai.

But I didn’t care. I wouldn’t get the chance to experience sleeping in a soft bed while on a train trip spanning almost 1,500 kilometers every day.

I haven’t experienced that in my country. And I can’t. Such train journeys are nonexistent in the Philippines.

Last day in Beijing

My mother and I checked out of our hotel at 12 noon. We still had nine hours to see the sights in the capital city of China, so we decided to go to a luggage storage facility to deposit our belongings. It cost us 30 yuan, or about US$4.40.

Then we explored Beijing on our own.

About four hours before our departure for Shanghai we went back to the train station to take pictures of its facade, buy some food, have dinner and get our things at the baggage storage facility.

At 9:35 PM, the train began to take us back to Shanghai.

Beijing to Shanghai train

I was impressed by the clean four-berth cabin that we were in. My mother and I occupied the double-deck bed on the right side. There were free slippers for the passengers, similar to the ones provided by hotels in China.

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But I was not impressed by the manners of the man occupying the lower berth on the left side of the compartment.

He rudely hushed me up while I was speaking with my mother in Filipino.

Fine. Maybe he was really tired and wanted to sleep early.

But after telling me to shut up (I assume in Chinese), he called someone on his cell phone and talked loudly for about five minutes.

Again, fine. I was in his country.

Back to Shanghai

Upon arrival in Shanghai, we immediately looked for a left luggage office where we could deposit our stuff for 30 yuan. It was about 8 AM. We could only check in at the hotel at 2 PM.

Since we had lots of spare time, we had breakfast and explored Shanghai again.

At about 1 PM we returned to the baggage storage facility near the train station to claim our things.

That act officially ended our almost 3,000-kilometer train trip that had taken us from Shanghai to Beijing and vice versa, in the heart of the third largest country in the world.

The ‘world’ is in Macau

Macau, a Special Administrative Region in China just like Hong Kong, has a land area of less than 30 square kilometers.

Yet, you can embark on a “world tour” when you’re in Macau. All it takes is some imagination: