North to Shen Yang

Today we were travelling to Chris's home city of Shen Yang, close to the Korean border. Train travel is organised very like air travel, with the high speed trains travelling huge distances. Tickets need to be booked, or bought the day before. Baggage, ticket and passport and body checks are all done as you enter the station. Then you make your way to a vast waiting room. On each side  numbers are displayed where the stairs descend to the platforms. Rows of seats are grouped beside each number. A concourse above the waiting room has rows of food and snack shops. When your train is due a green light appears above the platform number and everyone queues to have ticket and passport checked again. Then you have to move really quickly to get down to the platform and find your carriage against all the hundreds of others doing the same. There is only 3 or 4 minutes to do this and no leeway on time of departure so if you are not on board the doors close automatically and you are left behind. I was very excited to see that ours was a high speed bullet train and that we would travel the 427 miles in under 3 hours!  The aeroplane seats were really comfortable with lots of leg room, even for Chris.
It took a long time to clear the industrial and urban areas of Beijing, although on the outskirts these areas merged with intensive agricultural development. The whole landscape was flat as a pancake and  looked a bleached yellow brown  for hundreds of miles with the horizon merging into a brownish haze, a mix of winter fog and (according to smog ratings) particulate pollutants.  It grew steadily colder as we went North with snow on the ground. As in the picture there were lots of polytunnels for growing things and probably housing poultry but no one was working in the fields as the ground was frozen  
. Water was all frozen solid too and we saw people fishing through the ice on one larger river. There was a lot of recent tree planting in blocks  which broke up the enormous fields. And lots of enormous towns, where the train stopped.
It was an interesting ride and I started to comprehend just how vast the man-made landscape was in China. It was a relief to arrive in Shen yang and settle into the cosy apartment above a quiet courtyard that was being loaned by a friend.