After Ningbo, I went back to Shanghai for a couple of days, mainly because it was too hard to get transport straight from Ningbo to Beijing. I do like Shanghai a lot, though. I didn’t do too much worth writing about in those couple of days, but I did get to see the Bund at night, which was cool. That’s the riverfront area in Shanghai with a lot of old buildings and nice architecture on one side, and shiny modern things with bright lights on the other. The night view is pretty cool. I took some photos with my phone (still haven’t bought a proper camera), but you can probably find better ones online anyway. Oh, I had my birthday on Tuesday, too. Which is weird, because I’m 20 now, and I really, really shouldn’t be 20. The next day I caught the train to Beijing, which took about 11 hours. I really enjoyed it. I love long journeys on just about anything as long as it’s not too painfully uncomfortable -plane trips, train rides, long drives (in an extended moment of particular stupidity I once drove most of the way from Melbourne back to the Gold Coast in one go). Economy class wasn’t nearly as bad as I was afraid it might be, and I had a window seat. The view wasn’t what I’d call scenic, or particularly varied, but interesting all the same: mostly a succession of farms, farming villages and small towns. We passed through some bigger cities on the way, particularly Nanjing, but didn’t get to see much except some fairly bleak apartment buildings, because I guess people don’t put fancy things next to railway tracks. Anyway, my second time in Shanghai I found the foreign languages bookstore, so I spent most of the trip happily reading The Fellowship of the Ring.