Wet Beijing

Last week Nelson and I went on a little trip to Beijing. We took the futuristic bullet train, which takes only 5 hours to cover the 1066 km distance. Except for when Nelson peed on my neighbor's seat, the trip was great. The onboard restaurant served dried fish, dried sweet potato and dried salted pork so that I really felt like I was traveling. 

In Beijing we stayed with Florijn at the campus of his language university. Beijing is quite different from Shanghai: no skyscrapers everywhere but lots of green in the city. Campus life was good and simple, we had our breakfast in the 4 story canteen (maize porridge, dumplings, steamed buns and other delicacies :P) bought cookies in the little supermarket and had lots of naps on my hotelbed. 

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On Saturday, while we had planned to go and see the city, it rained so much that it hardly mattered if you used an umbrella or not. We stayed indoors and only when we got really hungry we ran over to the nearest dumpling place where the owner used chopsticks to make a hole in the ceiling to let the water through. We never realized it was the biggest rain in 60 years with 40,6 cm of water pouring down on the city killing 77 people.