I was thinking today about the Great Wall of China. It’s an extraordinary structure, of course—a marvel of design and engineering. But when you’re actually standing there looking at it, it’s impressive almost beyond words. And after a while, you find yourself thinking about what it must have taken to build it . . ….
I’m still not up to par—hack! cough!—and will, therefore, take the easy way out with today’s post by offering a few photos taken on my 2011 train trip from Moscow across Siberia to Mongolia, then south to Beijing. At the Mongolia-China border, we switched from a Russian to a Chinese train. Each of the…
My 2011 trip to Russia and China included rail travel from London to Berlin to Moscow to St. Petersburg and back to Moscow. At that point, I joined a tour that took us by rail across Siberia to Mongolia, then down to Beijing. On my own once again there, I took the Chinese high-speed train…
It must have been the lack of motion that woke me up. I didn’t know why were were stopped—there was no other train traffic—and then I heard someone passing by in the corridor saying it was the Gobi Desert and we were going to be stopped here for about a half hour. Furthermore, we were…