While we were in China, I kept up daily reports on WeChat, and when we got to Australia, I put a summary of these on WhatsApp. So my postings will now be reflections on the stories we can tell as we process them over the next few months. To start with, here's a Youtube video of our journey from London to Beijing. Ian says it's "scrappy" (limited by the erratic quality of my iphone photography) and that the sound track is inappropriate and badly recorded. The latter point is true - I was too lazy to track down a digital copy of Glenn Miller's recording of Chattanooga Choo choo. Inappropriate? The people we met in the dining car and corridors - Dutch, English, American, Italian, German, Swiss and Danish - all spoke to each other in (American) English. There was certainly an American quality to much of the consumer-traveller conversation about the quality of hotels, food and tourist destinations they'd been to or planned to visit. So a Glenn Miller soundtrack is no less appropriate than any other music for this part of our journey. Communication with the Russian, Mongolian and Chinese train staff was limited to getting our needs met (While Ian flirted with the Russian matrons in the dining car, I got very proficient in asking abbreviated versions of 我可以吗 保持 我的 医学 在你的 冰箱 "Can I keep my medicine in your fridge?") So we hung out mainly with our cabin neighbours, Carole and Michael, from Leeds. As well as sharing the bathroom between our two compartments, we shared politics, values and priorities and Carole had a keen eye for spotting and pointing out eagles flying over the desolate Mongolian landscape. We also found we'd booked into the same hotel in Beijing so here we are meeting our Chinese neighbours in Dongsi Si Tiao (4th alley)
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