Another day, another train …. This one, however, was different. This one flew at the speed of a bullet – well, a bullet train anyway! From having got used to clattering along and bouncing around at a maximum of 80-90 km per hour, all of a sudden, we were doing 300 km per hour. The big difference was that we really knew on previous trains that we were doing 90 kph, but on this one,we hardly even knew we were moving, let alone doing 300 kph. The whole journey was really smooth – you could quite easily walk down the aisle at full speed without even holding on to anything at all. We started out from Beijing on the 08.15 train and arrived at Xian at 14.16.
We were met off the train and, on the way to the hotel, were taken to the Little Wild Goose Pagoda in Xian. This was built between 707 and 709 in the Tang Dynasty. It was used to store sacred texts. The pagoda itself was surrounded by gardens and various other buildings and monuments and was a very peaceful place to wander around. It stood originally at 45m tall, but since the 1556 earthquake has been 2 metres less in height as the top fell off the roof. The rest, however, survived intact and has been left like this as a reminder of the earthquake.
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