A quiet Sunday in Beijing, as I continued to get over my jetlag. I lounged around during the morning, and then the three of us went to a nearby café to allow Martyn and Catherine to get some work done.
Dinner, however, was quite another story. Matt, a friend of Martyn and Catherine who they know through their school, was due to fly home on Tuesday, so he and his wife Janet joined the three of us for dinner at Fukunoya, a Japanese restaurant just ten minutes' walk away.
The menu allowed to order as many dishes from a certain list - basically more than half the total menu, excluding mainly expensive things like sashimi - for Y108 per head (about £10), inclusive of beer. Which was very good value, especially given how much we drank - though one pint was more than enough for me - and we had a hilarious evening chatting about everything from ash clouds to wedding dresses. Chicken teppanyaki was undoubtedly the best plate in an array of dishes shared by the five of us, including bacon rolls, shrimp, and salmon with cheese (which Martyn claims to have enjoyed).
The humidity had been rising all weekend, and in the evening the cloud finally mustered and gave us the biggest thunderstorm I can remember - though I'm told it's fairly normal for Beijing, even if this year it's been raining rather more than it used to. It cleared the air, and Monday saw clear skies. With the beer down me, I slept like a log - which was good, since I had a much busier day on Monday...
Monday, 14 June 2010
Sunday, 13 June 2010
The Far East: Day 3
I slept very well on Friday night, sleeping for nearly twelve hours. Not all that surprising given I'd been up for 31 hours. I had some breakfast and got a shower, and then found Iwas pretty much ready for lunch - the jetlag seems to have made me quite hungry. So I blogged a little and got a sandwich.
Catherine had some work to finish off, so Martyn and I headed out. Martyn needed to go to the tailors to get a suit fitted, so we did that before heading to the Sanlitun area of Beijing (pronounced Sanliter, thanks to the Beijing accent).
Sanlitun is one of the main areas in which expats live, and has a number of embassies nearby. There are a large number of Western shops, such as United Colours of Benetton. Martyn and I settled down for a couple of hours with some drinks and had a long chat, before Catherine joined us and we went for dinner.
Catherine and Martyn decided to give me a baptism of fire and take me to a proper Chinese restaurant. 'Chinese' food as eaten in the UK simply isn't what the Chinese eat. There are so many regional varieties of food that even attempting to try them all could keep you here for a year.
While I went to the bathroom, they ordered a variety of dishes, which we all shared. There were lamb skewers, very hot chicken wings, something that looked like pizza but was really bread in a bowl of tomato sauce and lamb pieces, and bite-size chicken pieces with leeks and chillies. My personal favourite was a combination of pancake pieces and cabbage, that looked not dissimilar to a bowl of fried onion, but which tasted nice without being overpowering; it was very moreish.
The trouble with sharing food is that you don't get it in portion-sized plates, so you're never quite sure of how much you've eaten. As it was I ate a fair amount, though I could probably have eaten more.
Unfortunately I'm still quite jetlagged as I write this on Sunday morning: I don't feel particularly tired, I just feel a bit disoriented, and a bit more hungry than normal. I'm sure it'll wear off soon.
I've not got much planned for today (i.e. Sunday, aka Day 4), but tomorrow I plan to head into Beijing city centre and see some of the sights like Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City.
Lastly, a correction to Day 2: Beijing terminal 3 is the second biggest terminal, but the biggest is Dubai T3, not Heathrow T5. In fact, I discovered that Beijing T3 is 17% bigger than all five of Heathrow's terminals put together! Beijing airport has rapidly ascended the rankings, and in 2009 was third in the world on passenger traffic (up from eighth in 2008); London Heathrow was second (up from third) and Atlanta remains first (as it has been since 2000).
Catherine had some work to finish off, so Martyn and I headed out. Martyn needed to go to the tailors to get a suit fitted, so we did that before heading to the Sanlitun area of Beijing (pronounced Sanliter, thanks to the Beijing accent).
Sanlitun is one of the main areas in which expats live, and has a number of embassies nearby. There are a large number of Western shops, such as United Colours of Benetton. Martyn and I settled down for a couple of hours with some drinks and had a long chat, before Catherine joined us and we went for dinner.
Catherine and Martyn decided to give me a baptism of fire and take me to a proper Chinese restaurant. 'Chinese' food as eaten in the UK simply isn't what the Chinese eat. There are so many regional varieties of food that even attempting to try them all could keep you here for a year.
While I went to the bathroom, they ordered a variety of dishes, which we all shared. There were lamb skewers, very hot chicken wings, something that looked like pizza but was really bread in a bowl of tomato sauce and lamb pieces, and bite-size chicken pieces with leeks and chillies. My personal favourite was a combination of pancake pieces and cabbage, that looked not dissimilar to a bowl of fried onion, but which tasted nice without being overpowering; it was very moreish.
The trouble with sharing food is that you don't get it in portion-sized plates, so you're never quite sure of how much you've eaten. As it was I ate a fair amount, though I could probably have eaten more.
Unfortunately I'm still quite jetlagged as I write this on Sunday morning: I don't feel particularly tired, I just feel a bit disoriented, and a bit more hungry than normal. I'm sure it'll wear off soon.
I've not got much planned for today (i.e. Sunday, aka Day 4), but tomorrow I plan to head into Beijing city centre and see some of the sights like Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City.
Lastly, a correction to Day 2: Beijing terminal 3 is the second biggest terminal, but the biggest is Dubai T3, not Heathrow T5. In fact, I discovered that Beijing T3 is 17% bigger than all five of Heathrow's terminals put together! Beijing airport has rapidly ascended the rankings, and in 2009 was third in the world on passenger traffic (up from eighth in 2008); London Heathrow was second (up from third) and Atlanta remains first (as it has been since 2000).
Saturday, 12 June 2010
The Far East: Day 2
First, a note on timezones. All of China uses GMT+8, and all of Japan uses GMT+9. Neither country observes daylight savings time, so the difference from British time is reduced to +7 and +8 respectively during the summer (as now). Unless otherwise stated, all times are local.
Flight NH202: 19:35 London Heathrow T3 to Tokyo Narita T1, arr 15:20
Operated by ANA (All Nippon Airways) using a Boeing 777-300ER, seat 32B
Pushback 19:36, wheels-up 19:50, wheels-down 14:50, on stand 14:58
Written c23:00 British tine / c07:00 Japan time:
As I write this we are 33000 ft in the air over Russia, just east of Saint Petersburg, about a quarter of the way from London to Tokyo. This is my first long-haul flight, and I must admit that it's not as horrid as I expected. So far, anyway.
The Boeing 777 is a twin-engined long-range widebody jet, most easily distinguished by its notched tailcone. This one has nine seats per row and was full, and there are perhaps a dozen gaijin (Westerners) like myself, the rest being Japanese. I guess that is to be expected given I'm flying with All Nippon Airways, the Japanese's second national airline (after Japan Airlines). Nearly half the main economy cabin is filled with about 50 Japanese schoolchildren, about 16 years old or so, who are evidently returning from a school trip to England.
We took off on time from runway 9R at Heathrow, climbing quickly into the low cloud, and headed east over Suffolk, out over the North Sea, directly over Copenhagen, before tracking over the Baltic Sea, southern Estonia (from which we got wonderful silhouettes of the Gulf of Finland) and St Petersburg. Aside from the Gulf of Finland, there is very little to see thanks to the cloud and the night.
Flying, as we are, so far north means that, of course, we come very close to the Arctic Circle. As such it's never really dark: there's always a red spit of flame on the horizon to the north (I'm one seat away from the left-hand, i.e. north-facing, window).
ANA is still a full-service airline, at least when it comes to long-haul. We were each provided with a blanket and pillow for the journey. Dinner service started about half an hour after takeoff, but since I'm four rows from the back I had to wait. In the meantime I watched an episode of Yes Minister which I had downloaded to my iPod.
There was a choice of a Japanese meal of noodles with shrimp and other assorted seafood, and a Western chicken and rice option. Much as I know my stomach will have to get used to it sooner or later, I wimped out and avoided the seafood option. The chicken piccanta with rice was quite nice - the chicken was remarkably tender - and the Mediterranean vegetables with it were tasty too. It came with a side of coleslaw and a few other cold vegetables, as well as a roll and butter (which I left, being a bit full). Dessert consisted of what I think was banoffee, I couldn't be entirely sure of what it was but it tasted nice enough. All in all a good dinner, at least by airline standards.
Now, for some sleep, methinks. It's been a long day, but in some sense it's already Friday morning...
---
Written c05:30 British time / c13:30 Japan time:
Having cruised over most of Siberia, we're now just approaching the north end of Hokkaido, the northernmost of the Japanese islands, about an hour and a half from touchdown. Breakfast/lunch is gradually being served. I haven't slept much: I slept for half an hour or so around 07:00 Japan time, and about two hours from 10:30 to 12:30 Japan time; otherwise I just dozed.
I envy the schoolkids, though: while some of them have curledt up and tried to sleep, most have been up all night playing video games and watching movies. Ah, to be 16 again...
I've now had my lunch - a very tasty roll with cheese, ham and chicken which you put together yourself, and a yogurt and some fruit salad. Boy, was I ready for that!
---
Written on day 3:
We got away so promptly from Heathrow that we landed half an hour early. So much so that I disembarked, went through security for connections, and found my gate ten minutes before we were due to land!
Narita is a very pleasant, spacious, modern airport; on this occasion, however, I could find little to do. I used the Internet for half an hour, but otherwise I just wandered around, too tired to do anything serious. There was a slight delay in boarding the next flight:
Flight NH955: 17:20 Tokyo Narita to Beijing, arr 20:10
Operated by ANA (All Nippon Airways) by a Boeing 767-300, seat 24A
Pushback 17:33, wheels-up 17:47, wheels-down 19:51, on stand 19:58
While I would have considered a three-and-a-half hour flight as pretty long until today, next to the long-haul flight I'd just stepped off it was nothing. In the end the flight time was only three hours and five minutes, ensuring an early arrival after a slightly late departure.
We were served a meal, a choice of fish or pork stew. The pork stew was not stew: it was some pieces of pork and mushroom in a thick, gloopy, orange-coloured sauce, and didn't taste great. It was served with mash and a few vegetables, which were alright. I couldn't work out if the (cold!) noodles with soy sauce, and the random selection of things which could just about be described as a 'salad', were meant as side dishes or a starter: as it was I didn't eat much of either. The dessert was a creme caramel, which was by far the best thing on the tray, even though it wasn't brilliant.
While I had a window seat, unfortunately I was right over the wing so I couldn't see much of the ground. On the other hand, most of Japan was shrouded in cloud, except Mount Fuji which stuck proudly up through the clouds. We then passed over South Korea before following the Gulf of Bohai up towards Beijing. The cloud didn't lift even as we came into land at Beijing, and only when we were a few feet off the ground could we see anything.
Beijing Capital Airport is, quite simply, enormous. Apparently Terminal Three is second in size only to Heathrow T5, but it seemed much bigger even than that, with a huge expansive roof and an internal subway system to move you from the gate (in T3E) to baggage reclaim (in T3C).
I retrieved my baggage, which successfully made it across Narita, and was met by my cousin Catherine. Catherine has been in Beijing for three years teaching in an international English-language school for ex-pats. She has a lovely flat in Sanyuanqiao in north-eastern Beijing, which she shares with her fiancé Martyn.
I got in to her flat about 21:15, had some cereal and got to bed after 31 hours being awake (well, that does include a couple of hours of sleep on the plane).
News of day 3 to follow shortly!
Flight NH202: 19:35 London Heathrow T3 to Tokyo Narita T1, arr 15:20
Operated by ANA (All Nippon Airways) using a Boeing 777-300ER, seat 32B
Pushback 19:36, wheels-up 19:50, wheels-down 14:50, on stand 14:58
Written c23:00 British tine / c07:00 Japan time:
As I write this we are 33000 ft in the air over Russia, just east of Saint Petersburg, about a quarter of the way from London to Tokyo. This is my first long-haul flight, and I must admit that it's not as horrid as I expected. So far, anyway.
The Boeing 777 is a twin-engined long-range widebody jet, most easily distinguished by its notched tailcone. This one has nine seats per row and was full, and there are perhaps a dozen gaijin (Westerners) like myself, the rest being Japanese. I guess that is to be expected given I'm flying with All Nippon Airways, the Japanese's second national airline (after Japan Airlines). Nearly half the main economy cabin is filled with about 50 Japanese schoolchildren, about 16 years old or so, who are evidently returning from a school trip to England.
We took off on time from runway 9R at Heathrow, climbing quickly into the low cloud, and headed east over Suffolk, out over the North Sea, directly over Copenhagen, before tracking over the Baltic Sea, southern Estonia (from which we got wonderful silhouettes of the Gulf of Finland) and St Petersburg. Aside from the Gulf of Finland, there is very little to see thanks to the cloud and the night.
Flying, as we are, so far north means that, of course, we come very close to the Arctic Circle. As such it's never really dark: there's always a red spit of flame on the horizon to the north (I'm one seat away from the left-hand, i.e. north-facing, window).
ANA is still a full-service airline, at least when it comes to long-haul. We were each provided with a blanket and pillow for the journey. Dinner service started about half an hour after takeoff, but since I'm four rows from the back I had to wait. In the meantime I watched an episode of Yes Minister which I had downloaded to my iPod.
There was a choice of a Japanese meal of noodles with shrimp and other assorted seafood, and a Western chicken and rice option. Much as I know my stomach will have to get used to it sooner or later, I wimped out and avoided the seafood option. The chicken piccanta with rice was quite nice - the chicken was remarkably tender - and the Mediterranean vegetables with it were tasty too. It came with a side of coleslaw and a few other cold vegetables, as well as a roll and butter (which I left, being a bit full). Dessert consisted of what I think was banoffee, I couldn't be entirely sure of what it was but it tasted nice enough. All in all a good dinner, at least by airline standards.
Now, for some sleep, methinks. It's been a long day, but in some sense it's already Friday morning...
---
Written c05:30 British time / c13:30 Japan time:
Having cruised over most of Siberia, we're now just approaching the north end of Hokkaido, the northernmost of the Japanese islands, about an hour and a half from touchdown. Breakfast/lunch is gradually being served. I haven't slept much: I slept for half an hour or so around 07:00 Japan time, and about two hours from 10:30 to 12:30 Japan time; otherwise I just dozed.
I envy the schoolkids, though: while some of them have curledt up and tried to sleep, most have been up all night playing video games and watching movies. Ah, to be 16 again...
I've now had my lunch - a very tasty roll with cheese, ham and chicken which you put together yourself, and a yogurt and some fruit salad. Boy, was I ready for that!
---
Written on day 3:
We got away so promptly from Heathrow that we landed half an hour early. So much so that I disembarked, went through security for connections, and found my gate ten minutes before we were due to land!
Narita is a very pleasant, spacious, modern airport; on this occasion, however, I could find little to do. I used the Internet for half an hour, but otherwise I just wandered around, too tired to do anything serious. There was a slight delay in boarding the next flight:
Flight NH955: 17:20 Tokyo Narita to Beijing, arr 20:10
Operated by ANA (All Nippon Airways) by a Boeing 767-300, seat 24A
Pushback 17:33, wheels-up 17:47, wheels-down 19:51, on stand 19:58
While I would have considered a three-and-a-half hour flight as pretty long until today, next to the long-haul flight I'd just stepped off it was nothing. In the end the flight time was only three hours and five minutes, ensuring an early arrival after a slightly late departure.
We were served a meal, a choice of fish or pork stew. The pork stew was not stew: it was some pieces of pork and mushroom in a thick, gloopy, orange-coloured sauce, and didn't taste great. It was served with mash and a few vegetables, which were alright. I couldn't work out if the (cold!) noodles with soy sauce, and the random selection of things which could just about be described as a 'salad', were meant as side dishes or a starter: as it was I didn't eat much of either. The dessert was a creme caramel, which was by far the best thing on the tray, even though it wasn't brilliant.
While I had a window seat, unfortunately I was right over the wing so I couldn't see much of the ground. On the other hand, most of Japan was shrouded in cloud, except Mount Fuji which stuck proudly up through the clouds. We then passed over South Korea before following the Gulf of Bohai up towards Beijing. The cloud didn't lift even as we came into land at Beijing, and only when we were a few feet off the ground could we see anything.
Beijing Capital Airport is, quite simply, enormous. Apparently Terminal Three is second in size only to Heathrow T5, but it seemed much bigger even than that, with a huge expansive roof and an internal subway system to move you from the gate (in T3E) to baggage reclaim (in T3C).
I retrieved my baggage, which successfully made it across Narita, and was met by my cousin Catherine. Catherine has been in Beijing for three years teaching in an international English-language school for ex-pats. She has a lovely flat in Sanyuanqiao in north-eastern Beijing, which she shares with her fiancé Martyn.
I got in to her flat about 21:15, had some cereal and got to bed after 31 hours being awake (well, that does include a couple of hours of sleep on the plane).
News of day 3 to follow shortly!
Thursday, 10 June 2010
The Far East, Day 1
Well, I've made it as far as Heathrow, and I'm currently sat in an internet café killing time before my 19:35 flight to Tokyo, whence I have two hours to catch a flight on to Beijing, arriving at 20:10 on Friday, 17 1/2 hours after leaving London.
The day started all too early at 09:30 British time, which was especially painful having only got to sleep at about 04:30. I hope I'll get some sleep on the flight. A shower, some final packing and some photocopying of documents later, I left the house at 11:25. My mum gave me a lift to Belfast City airport, where I caught
Flight BD87: 13:05 Belfast City to London Heathrow T1, arr 14:25
Operated by BMI (British Midland) using an Airbus A319; seat 8D
Pushback 1304, wheels-up 1310, wheels-down 1407, on stand 1415
A routine short hop across the Irish Sea: my 58th flight ever, and my 67th ever crossing of the Irish Sea (inclusive of ferries). BMI are familiar to me, mainly because my dad used to use them quite frequently for trips to London (maybe once a month or so). I last used them in 2004 for a day trip to Imperial College London for an open day, back when I was choosing undergraduate courses. Since then, the traditional full-service model has been replace by the now-standard buy-on-board system, which I didn't end up using mainly because I was too tired to want anything to eat.
We got away bang on time, and landed in Heathrow early with none of the usual ATC delays, on runway 9L. We got a good view of Terminal 5 on our right as we came into land; I hadn't realised the network of elevated roadways that allow seamless access to every level, and it looked quite impressive from 50 feet in the air. Unfortunately being early meant the gate wasn't quite ready for us, and even when it was we still had a 20-minute wait for our baggage.
Once my case arrived, I went down into the bowels under the terminals, and went for a seemingly interminable walk past the Piccadilly line station and the Heathrow Express station to get to Terminal 3, arriving there about 15:00. Unfortunately, the flight doesn't leave till 19:35, so the check-in desks didn't open until 16:30 or so. So I went and got some lunch.
It was after that that it finally started to hit me that I was going to a far-off distant land: I bought 1400 Chinese renminbi, and 18,000 Japanese yen. (That's about £150 of each.) After killing time in bookshops and on the phone, I went to check in.
Check-in was, itself, not the simple affair I'm used to. Because I'm spending a week in China and two weeks in Japan, I couldn't book London-Tokyo-Beijing on a single ticket, so the lady at the check-in desk at All Nippon Airways (Japan's second national carrier) had to input my connection data manually.
After a few minutes typing away at the computer, I came away with both boarding cards. That was a big relief; if I'd had to check in again in Tokyo (Narita) it would have been quite tight. But now that both I and my baggage are checked through to Beijing, all I have to do when I get to Tokyo is clear immigration and find the gate. In theory, anyway.
Now, however, I have a dilemma: what time to think of it as? It's 17:30 in London, 00:30 in Beijing and 01:30 in Tokyo. And I only have one watch. This is going to be confusing.
Anyway, I'll try and write some stuff on the two planes, which are:
NH202, 19:35 London Heathrow T3 to Tokyo Narita T1, arr 15:20 (Fri)
NH955, 17:20 Tokyo Narita T1 to Beijing, arr 20:10
I don't expect I'll get time to post on Friday night, so Day 2's post will hopefully come sometime on Saturday, after I've settled into Beijing.
The day started all too early at 09:30 British time, which was especially painful having only got to sleep at about 04:30. I hope I'll get some sleep on the flight. A shower, some final packing and some photocopying of documents later, I left the house at 11:25. My mum gave me a lift to Belfast City airport, where I caught
Flight BD87: 13:05 Belfast City to London Heathrow T1, arr 14:25
Operated by BMI (British Midland) using an Airbus A319; seat 8D
Pushback 1304, wheels-up 1310, wheels-down 1407, on stand 1415
A routine short hop across the Irish Sea: my 58th flight ever, and my 67th ever crossing of the Irish Sea (inclusive of ferries). BMI are familiar to me, mainly because my dad used to use them quite frequently for trips to London (maybe once a month or so). I last used them in 2004 for a day trip to Imperial College London for an open day, back when I was choosing undergraduate courses. Since then, the traditional full-service model has been replace by the now-standard buy-on-board system, which I didn't end up using mainly because I was too tired to want anything to eat.
We got away bang on time, and landed in Heathrow early with none of the usual ATC delays, on runway 9L. We got a good view of Terminal 5 on our right as we came into land; I hadn't realised the network of elevated roadways that allow seamless access to every level, and it looked quite impressive from 50 feet in the air. Unfortunately being early meant the gate wasn't quite ready for us, and even when it was we still had a 20-minute wait for our baggage.
Once my case arrived, I went down into the bowels under the terminals, and went for a seemingly interminable walk past the Piccadilly line station and the Heathrow Express station to get to Terminal 3, arriving there about 15:00. Unfortunately, the flight doesn't leave till 19:35, so the check-in desks didn't open until 16:30 or so. So I went and got some lunch.
It was after that that it finally started to hit me that I was going to a far-off distant land: I bought 1400 Chinese renminbi, and 18,000 Japanese yen. (That's about £150 of each.) After killing time in bookshops and on the phone, I went to check in.
Check-in was, itself, not the simple affair I'm used to. Because I'm spending a week in China and two weeks in Japan, I couldn't book London-Tokyo-Beijing on a single ticket, so the lady at the check-in desk at All Nippon Airways (Japan's second national carrier) had to input my connection data manually.
After a few minutes typing away at the computer, I came away with both boarding cards. That was a big relief; if I'd had to check in again in Tokyo (Narita) it would have been quite tight. But now that both I and my baggage are checked through to Beijing, all I have to do when I get to Tokyo is clear immigration and find the gate. In theory, anyway.
Now, however, I have a dilemma: what time to think of it as? It's 17:30 in London, 00:30 in Beijing and 01:30 in Tokyo. And I only have one watch. This is going to be confusing.
Anyway, I'll try and write some stuff on the two planes, which are:
NH202, 19:35 London Heathrow T3 to Tokyo Narita T1, arr 15:20 (Fri)
NH955, 17:20 Tokyo Narita T1 to Beijing, arr 20:10
I don't expect I'll get time to post on Friday night, so Day 2's post will hopefully come sometime on Saturday, after I've settled into Beijing.
The Far East, Day 0
By the time you read this I will be on my way to China! I'm spending nine nights with my cousin Catherine in Beijing. Then I fly to Tokyo to meet up with Jonathan Elliott, who is in Japan visiting his brother. We will spend six days touring Japan, then he flies home and I have another week of tourism.
In full, I fly with Bmi from Belfast to Heathrow, then with All Nippon Airways from there to Tokyo and on to Beijing. I leave at 1305 on Thursday 10th June, and arrive at 2010 Friday (Beijing time), 24 hours later.
I then fly on to Tokyo on Sunday 20th June at 0830, arriving at 1300 (Japan time). Coming home, I leave Tokyo at 1130 on Saturday 3rd July and arrive home at 2055, 17 hours later.
Timezones are _weird_.
For the purposes of this blog, which I shall be updating as often as possible from my iPod touch, I define Thursday 10th June to be Day 1; that will make Saturday 3rd July day 24.
I have a Japan Rail Pass, which is basically like an All Line Rover, but for Japan. And only available to foreign visitors. And cheaper, at ¥45100 (£347). So I shall be doing much train travel in Japan!
As I say, I'll update when I can, and if all else fails I'll upload the story when I'm home. Watch this space!
Now, to finish packing...
In full, I fly with Bmi from Belfast to Heathrow, then with All Nippon Airways from there to Tokyo and on to Beijing. I leave at 1305 on Thursday 10th June, and arrive at 2010 Friday (Beijing time), 24 hours later.
I then fly on to Tokyo on Sunday 20th June at 0830, arriving at 1300 (Japan time). Coming home, I leave Tokyo at 1130 on Saturday 3rd July and arrive home at 2055, 17 hours later.
Timezones are _weird_.
For the purposes of this blog, which I shall be updating as often as possible from my iPod touch, I define Thursday 10th June to be Day 1; that will make Saturday 3rd July day 24.
I have a Japan Rail Pass, which is basically like an All Line Rover, but for Japan. And only available to foreign visitors. And cheaper, at ¥45100 (£347). So I shall be doing much train travel in Japan!
As I say, I'll update when I can, and if all else fails I'll upload the story when I'm home. Watch this space!
Now, to finish packing...
Thursday, 11 March 2010
Increasing capacity on the railways: my verdict on High Speed Rail
Today Lord Adonis, the Secretary of State for Transport, announced a £30bn plan to build a high-speed railway line between London and Birmingham from 2017, eventually extending to Manchester and Leeds. Here I'm going to try and examine the plans and give my verdict.
The basic idea of high-speed rail in the UK is that we should build new tracks to take the strain off the existing mainlines, and make the new lines capable of trains travelling at more than 200mph. This would give a much-needed injection of capacity into our struggling mainlines. It's analogous to the situation of the road network in the 1950s: the A-roads were clogged and there wasn't any capacity to do anything. So we built the motorways. High-speed rail is to the railway network what motorways are to the road network.
The point of high-speed rail is not speed, it's capacity. Again, it's like the motorways: we didn't build the motorways so we could all whizz up and down the country at 100mph, we built them so the A-roads didn't collapse under the strain. That's not to say that we can't get fantastic speeds out of new high-speed lines. Herein lies another similarity to motorways: both need to be built wide and straight, to maximise the speed. The world speed record for traditional steel-wheel-on-steel-rail trains is held by the French, with one of their TGVs attaining an astonishing 574.8 km/h (357.2 mph).
The idea of high-speed rail has been around for a long time: the Japanese started in 1964, as a showcase for the Tokyo Olympics. The Shinkansen (or Bullet Train) has become synonymous with high-speed rail, with a network covering the whole of Japan.
The French were the pioneers in Europe, starting with Paris to Lyon in 1981, a line not dissimilar to our West Coast Main Line (WCML). But instead of upgrading the existing line, as we did between 1999 and 2008, they chose to build a completely new line. The result? Journey times on Paris-Lyon were cut from 5 hours to 2 hours overnight. Since then, the French have built a vast network extending from Lille to Marseilles, from Le Mans to Strasbourg.
The rest of Europe has got in on the act too, with Spain, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium all building their own high-speed lines. The first high-speed line in the UK was opened in 2007 to connect London to the Channel Tunnel.
The second line, whose plans were announced today, would run from London to Birmingham and Rugeley, with a connection to the WCML to permit onwards services to Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. This would take all the fast trains off the WCML and leave lots of capacity south of Rugby for growth and for new services.
The capacity increase comes from the act of building new tracks: in that respect, building a new ordinary-speed line would have just the same (if not more) effect on capacity. Once you've decided to build new tracks, however, it makes more economic sense to build them to be capable of very fast speeds, because more people will be attracted to a faster train service, so you get more money out of them and the investment is thus justified.
Let's not kid ourselves: the investment required for building high-speed lines in Britain would be huge. And we, as taxpayers, would foot almost all of the bill. The first line to the Channel Tunnel cost £5 billion. According to today's report, the second line from London to Birmingham announced today might cost £17 billion, and a Y-shaped network to take the pressure off the West Coast and East Coast Main Lines and get all the way from London to Manchester and Leeds could cost £30 billion.
Put another way, a line from London to Birmingham would cost cost every British man, woman and child £280 each. The full network reaching from London to Manchester and Leeds would cost £500 each. Some would say that's quite a lot of money; it is, but in some ways it's actually very good value for money. Because the benefits would be, quite simply, enormous.
Primarily, it would give the network the injection of capacity it sorely needs. As I said before, the West Coast Main Line will be out of capacity in about a decade. Building a second high-speed line from London to the West Midlands would effectively double the capacity for long-distance trains to the North West and Scotland.
The East Coast Main Line suffers from a massive bottleneck at Welwyn, where four tracks merge into two to squeeze through a long viaduct and two long tunnels. Even the cheapest plan to fix this bottleneck would probably cost at least £3 billion, and the capacity increase would be nothing compared to that provided by a high-speed line between London and Yorkshire - given the limited capacity of the ECML it's not hard to imagine that such a high-speed line could triple capacity between London and Yorkshire.
As a secondary effect, journey times would be significantly reduced. Even with just a simple London-West Midlands high-speed line, journey times on London-Birmingham would be cut from 1 hour 20 minutes to just 49 minutes; London-Manchester, currently standing at about 2 hours 5 minutes, could take just 1 hour 40 minutes; and London-Glasgow could be reduced from 4 hours 30 minutes to under 4 hours.
With a network that extends to Manchester and Leeds, London to Glasgow or Edinburgh could be as fast as just 3 hours 30 minutes. That would put a serious dent in British Airways and BMI, who have a lucrative eight flights a day -- each! -- between London and Glasgow and London and Edinburgh.
The space capacity on the West Coast Main Line would permit a whole range of services which have been sidelined to come back to life. It would permit a huge increase in commuter services to the likes of Watford Junction, Milton Keynes and Northampton. It would also permit services to smaller cities such as Blackpool to return; London-Blackpool services last ran in 2003, withdrawn to make room for more services to Glasgow and Liverpool.
It also gives room for increased freight traffic: a single train composed of deep-sea containers can do the work of thirty or more HGVs. With more capacity for freight on our railways, we can start to remove freight from the roads, and so even the road network ends up with more capacity as a result.
All this begs the question that, if high-speed rail is so good, why hasn't it been built already? In part that's down to the decisions in the 1960s and 1970s to upgrade the existing network instead of building new lines, and this attitude has prevailed ever since. But there's only so much upgrading that can be done, and the last big upgrade on the West Coast Main Line resulted in a sub-standard weekend service for most of the last decade.
By contrast, building high-speed lines causes much less disruption to the existing railway network, but instead causes years of planning enquiries and NIMBYism. Today's report is the result of a year-long study by HS2 Ltd to find the best route between London and Birmingham; this route will cut through the Chilterns, and already the opposition from the Campaign to Protect Rural England has been vociferous.
Nevertheless, all three main political parties have agreed over the last few years to the necessity of high-speed rail in principle, which means that today's report stands a good chance of being implemented eventually, if not perhaps quite as soon as the timescale envisaged by Lord Adonis today which would involve construction starting in 2017 and opening in 2026.
However, the Conservative shadow transport secretary, Theresa Villiers, said that Labour had "betrayed" the vision of high-speed rail set out by the Conservatives a few years ago; in particular she lamented the fact that today's plans only got as far as Birmingham, not Manchester and Leeds, and that Heathrow was not to be served directly.
While today's plans don't set out detailed plans for lines to Manchester and Leeds, they do endorse them as the vital next step after building the line from London to Birmingham. Pretty much everyone agrees that you've got to go via Birmingham to get to the north, so today's announcement is a reasonable first step, and planning on lines to Manchester and Leeds can follow later once we've cut our teeth on the line to Birmingham.
How to serve Heathrow, however, has been a subject of contentious debate in the railway press for many years now. Heathrow is not well-served by trains, with only the Heathrow Express service into Paddington as a link to the wider railway network; a long wished-for connection from Heathrow to Reading has been suggested for many years but has not materialised. This is in contrast to Gatwick, which has had direct train connections to London, Brighton, Southampton, Portsmouth, Bedford, Luton, Reading and many other places in the south of England for decades.
Today's proposals see Heathrow being served by a station in the Acton area of west London to allow interchange between High Speed Two (the new line to Birmingham) and Crossrail, the new east-west suburban line across London which will serve Heathrow from 2017. This would permit passengers to make one train change to get between Heathrow and the north of England, as well as making access to the west end and the Docklands much easier.
The Tories would prefer this station to be much nearer Heathrow, or perhaps even underneath the airport (though this would require much more expensive tunnelling). This is because the Tories see the primary purpose of high-speed rail as an alternative to domestic air travel, so much so that they've proposed building high-speed rail instead of a third runway at Heathrow.
In my view that simply isn't a feasible goal, since for it to make any kind of a dent in usage at Heathrow you'd need a line all the way to Scotland, which would probably cost in excess of £50 billion and take 30 years to build. What's more, the fraction of flights out of Heathrow which are domestic is so small that removing them would still leave the airport close to capacity. No, as evidenced by every other country which has built high-speed rail the fundamental purpose of high-speed rail is capacity of the railway network itself; any effects it might have on air travel are secondary.
One key feature of today's report has been detailed proposals on exactly how the high-speed line will serve London and Birmingham. It's no use buildling a high-speed line from the edge of London to the edge of Birmingham if it can't get into the city centres. Today it has been proposed to expand and rebuild London Euston to take high-speed trains, and to run the tracks out along a lightly-used line through West Ruislip.
They also plan to build a new station on derelict land just east of Birmingham New Street, on the site of the old Curzon Street station. The latter is something I've been advocating for several years, and I'm very pleased that the report has not tried to shoehorn the high-speed services into an existing station at Moor Street or New Street, since neither would be able to cope. (I intend to examine Birmingham in more detail in a future blog post.)
There will undoubtedly be opponents to the route chosen between London and Birmingham, which cuts through swathes of countryside in Buckinghamshire and Warwickshire. There will be questions from many along the lines of "why should we put up with a line through our back yard from which we can't get any benefit unless we drive to Birmingham or London?" The answer, of course, is that they will benefit from improved services on existing railway lines and less traffic on the roads. I know that won't silence them, but I can live in hope, right?
Today's report spells out the detail of how High Speed Two should be constructed. What it doesn't spell out, however, is how it's going to be paid for. At a cost of £17 billion, no government would be eager to part with that much cash; in this economic climate it would be a miracle.
However, there is much detailed design work and consultation to be done before we can actually start building; it is most likely that construction will begin no earlier than 2017, once Crossrail has been completed. So hopefully the economy will have recovered significantly by then, and the funding for a high-speed line would be forthcoming. Make no mistake, however; the bulk of the funding must come from the government, and thus, ultimately, from taxpayers.
In conclusion, then, today's report is a huge milestone on the road to high-speed rail in England, and I commend the work of both HS2 Ltd and Lord Adonis in getting us this far. I think today is perhaps the day that the question turned from if we see high-speed rail to when. However, to see exactly what happens next, and when, we must wait until after the general election.
The basic idea of high-speed rail in the UK is that we should build new tracks to take the strain off the existing mainlines, and make the new lines capable of trains travelling at more than 200mph. This would give a much-needed injection of capacity into our struggling mainlines. It's analogous to the situation of the road network in the 1950s: the A-roads were clogged and there wasn't any capacity to do anything. So we built the motorways. High-speed rail is to the railway network what motorways are to the road network.
The point of high-speed rail is not speed, it's capacity. Again, it's like the motorways: we didn't build the motorways so we could all whizz up and down the country at 100mph, we built them so the A-roads didn't collapse under the strain. That's not to say that we can't get fantastic speeds out of new high-speed lines. Herein lies another similarity to motorways: both need to be built wide and straight, to maximise the speed. The world speed record for traditional steel-wheel-on-steel-rail trains is held by the French, with one of their TGVs attaining an astonishing 574.8 km/h (357.2 mph).
The idea of high-speed rail has been around for a long time: the Japanese started in 1964, as a showcase for the Tokyo Olympics. The Shinkansen (or Bullet Train) has become synonymous with high-speed rail, with a network covering the whole of Japan.
The French were the pioneers in Europe, starting with Paris to Lyon in 1981, a line not dissimilar to our West Coast Main Line (WCML). But instead of upgrading the existing line, as we did between 1999 and 2008, they chose to build a completely new line. The result? Journey times on Paris-Lyon were cut from 5 hours to 2 hours overnight. Since then, the French have built a vast network extending from Lille to Marseilles, from Le Mans to Strasbourg.
The rest of Europe has got in on the act too, with Spain, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium all building their own high-speed lines. The first high-speed line in the UK was opened in 2007 to connect London to the Channel Tunnel.
The second line, whose plans were announced today, would run from London to Birmingham and Rugeley, with a connection to the WCML to permit onwards services to Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. This would take all the fast trains off the WCML and leave lots of capacity south of Rugby for growth and for new services.
The capacity increase comes from the act of building new tracks: in that respect, building a new ordinary-speed line would have just the same (if not more) effect on capacity. Once you've decided to build new tracks, however, it makes more economic sense to build them to be capable of very fast speeds, because more people will be attracted to a faster train service, so you get more money out of them and the investment is thus justified.
Let's not kid ourselves: the investment required for building high-speed lines in Britain would be huge. And we, as taxpayers, would foot almost all of the bill. The first line to the Channel Tunnel cost £5 billion. According to today's report, the second line from London to Birmingham announced today might cost £17 billion, and a Y-shaped network to take the pressure off the West Coast and East Coast Main Lines and get all the way from London to Manchester and Leeds could cost £30 billion.
Put another way, a line from London to Birmingham would cost cost every British man, woman and child £280 each. The full network reaching from London to Manchester and Leeds would cost £500 each. Some would say that's quite a lot of money; it is, but in some ways it's actually very good value for money. Because the benefits would be, quite simply, enormous.
Primarily, it would give the network the injection of capacity it sorely needs. As I said before, the West Coast Main Line will be out of capacity in about a decade. Building a second high-speed line from London to the West Midlands would effectively double the capacity for long-distance trains to the North West and Scotland.
The East Coast Main Line suffers from a massive bottleneck at Welwyn, where four tracks merge into two to squeeze through a long viaduct and two long tunnels. Even the cheapest plan to fix this bottleneck would probably cost at least £3 billion, and the capacity increase would be nothing compared to that provided by a high-speed line between London and Yorkshire - given the limited capacity of the ECML it's not hard to imagine that such a high-speed line could triple capacity between London and Yorkshire.
As a secondary effect, journey times would be significantly reduced. Even with just a simple London-West Midlands high-speed line, journey times on London-Birmingham would be cut from 1 hour 20 minutes to just 49 minutes; London-Manchester, currently standing at about 2 hours 5 minutes, could take just 1 hour 40 minutes; and London-Glasgow could be reduced from 4 hours 30 minutes to under 4 hours.
With a network that extends to Manchester and Leeds, London to Glasgow or Edinburgh could be as fast as just 3 hours 30 minutes. That would put a serious dent in British Airways and BMI, who have a lucrative eight flights a day -- each! -- between London and Glasgow and London and Edinburgh.
The space capacity on the West Coast Main Line would permit a whole range of services which have been sidelined to come back to life. It would permit a huge increase in commuter services to the likes of Watford Junction, Milton Keynes and Northampton. It would also permit services to smaller cities such as Blackpool to return; London-Blackpool services last ran in 2003, withdrawn to make room for more services to Glasgow and Liverpool.
It also gives room for increased freight traffic: a single train composed of deep-sea containers can do the work of thirty or more HGVs. With more capacity for freight on our railways, we can start to remove freight from the roads, and so even the road network ends up with more capacity as a result.
All this begs the question that, if high-speed rail is so good, why hasn't it been built already? In part that's down to the decisions in the 1960s and 1970s to upgrade the existing network instead of building new lines, and this attitude has prevailed ever since. But there's only so much upgrading that can be done, and the last big upgrade on the West Coast Main Line resulted in a sub-standard weekend service for most of the last decade.
By contrast, building high-speed lines causes much less disruption to the existing railway network, but instead causes years of planning enquiries and NIMBYism. Today's report is the result of a year-long study by HS2 Ltd to find the best route between London and Birmingham; this route will cut through the Chilterns, and already the opposition from the Campaign to Protect Rural England has been vociferous.
Nevertheless, all three main political parties have agreed over the last few years to the necessity of high-speed rail in principle, which means that today's report stands a good chance of being implemented eventually, if not perhaps quite as soon as the timescale envisaged by Lord Adonis today which would involve construction starting in 2017 and opening in 2026.
However, the Conservative shadow transport secretary, Theresa Villiers, said that Labour had "betrayed" the vision of high-speed rail set out by the Conservatives a few years ago; in particular she lamented the fact that today's plans only got as far as Birmingham, not Manchester and Leeds, and that Heathrow was not to be served directly.
While today's plans don't set out detailed plans for lines to Manchester and Leeds, they do endorse them as the vital next step after building the line from London to Birmingham. Pretty much everyone agrees that you've got to go via Birmingham to get to the north, so today's announcement is a reasonable first step, and planning on lines to Manchester and Leeds can follow later once we've cut our teeth on the line to Birmingham.
How to serve Heathrow, however, has been a subject of contentious debate in the railway press for many years now. Heathrow is not well-served by trains, with only the Heathrow Express service into Paddington as a link to the wider railway network; a long wished-for connection from Heathrow to Reading has been suggested for many years but has not materialised. This is in contrast to Gatwick, which has had direct train connections to London, Brighton, Southampton, Portsmouth, Bedford, Luton, Reading and many other places in the south of England for decades.
Today's proposals see Heathrow being served by a station in the Acton area of west London to allow interchange between High Speed Two (the new line to Birmingham) and Crossrail, the new east-west suburban line across London which will serve Heathrow from 2017. This would permit passengers to make one train change to get between Heathrow and the north of England, as well as making access to the west end and the Docklands much easier.
The Tories would prefer this station to be much nearer Heathrow, or perhaps even underneath the airport (though this would require much more expensive tunnelling). This is because the Tories see the primary purpose of high-speed rail as an alternative to domestic air travel, so much so that they've proposed building high-speed rail instead of a third runway at Heathrow.
In my view that simply isn't a feasible goal, since for it to make any kind of a dent in usage at Heathrow you'd need a line all the way to Scotland, which would probably cost in excess of £50 billion and take 30 years to build. What's more, the fraction of flights out of Heathrow which are domestic is so small that removing them would still leave the airport close to capacity. No, as evidenced by every other country which has built high-speed rail the fundamental purpose of high-speed rail is capacity of the railway network itself; any effects it might have on air travel are secondary.
One key feature of today's report has been detailed proposals on exactly how the high-speed line will serve London and Birmingham. It's no use buildling a high-speed line from the edge of London to the edge of Birmingham if it can't get into the city centres. Today it has been proposed to expand and rebuild London Euston to take high-speed trains, and to run the tracks out along a lightly-used line through West Ruislip.
They also plan to build a new station on derelict land just east of Birmingham New Street, on the site of the old Curzon Street station. The latter is something I've been advocating for several years, and I'm very pleased that the report has not tried to shoehorn the high-speed services into an existing station at Moor Street or New Street, since neither would be able to cope. (I intend to examine Birmingham in more detail in a future blog post.)
There will undoubtedly be opponents to the route chosen between London and Birmingham, which cuts through swathes of countryside in Buckinghamshire and Warwickshire. There will be questions from many along the lines of "why should we put up with a line through our back yard from which we can't get any benefit unless we drive to Birmingham or London?" The answer, of course, is that they will benefit from improved services on existing railway lines and less traffic on the roads. I know that won't silence them, but I can live in hope, right?
Today's report spells out the detail of how High Speed Two should be constructed. What it doesn't spell out, however, is how it's going to be paid for. At a cost of £17 billion, no government would be eager to part with that much cash; in this economic climate it would be a miracle.
However, there is much detailed design work and consultation to be done before we can actually start building; it is most likely that construction will begin no earlier than 2017, once Crossrail has been completed. So hopefully the economy will have recovered significantly by then, and the funding for a high-speed line would be forthcoming. Make no mistake, however; the bulk of the funding must come from the government, and thus, ultimately, from taxpayers.
In conclusion, then, today's report is a huge milestone on the road to high-speed rail in England, and I commend the work of both HS2 Ltd and Lord Adonis in getting us this far. I think today is perhaps the day that the question turned from if we see high-speed rail to when. However, to see exactly what happens next, and when, we must wait until after the general election.
Monday, 9 November 2009
And The Wall Came Tumbling Down
Every so often, I start to wonder what if I'd been born at a different point in history. I sometimes wish I'd been alive in the 1960s: so many defining moments of the 20th century fell within that great decade, not least the first Moon landing, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Prague Spring; though if I were pressed to pick just one thing from that decade I'd probably choose to be present at John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, the "Ask not what your country can do for you" speech.
I've always felt my generation has been starved of moments that truly define history: with the exception of 9/11 and the ensuing chaos in the Middle East (not that there wasn't chaos there before), the political makeup of the world hasn't changed dramatically since I was very young. So today, I wish I were just a few years older, that I might remember the most momentous event of the last forty years: the fall of the Berlin Wall.
While tensions had been building for quite some time, and the feeling was that it was a question of when East Germany would collapse rather than if, the sudden nature of the downfall took almost everyone by surprise, including the East Germans.
In fact, it was all something of an accident. For a fascinating, and funny, insight of a western reporter into life in East Berlin when the wall fell, this article from the Sunday Times, an extract from a book by Peter Millar, is well worth a read.
On November 9th, 1989, the East German Politburo agreed to ease travel restrictions on East German citizens, letting them leave and re-enter the country at will, once they had a visa, which would be issued starting the following morning.
However, their spokesman wasn't quite speaking from the same script. Gunter Schabowski was handed the new rules just before a press conference, and announced them to the world. He wasn't clear on the details: he made no mention of the need to obtain a visa, for example, and when asked by a reporter when the laws came into effect, he replied: "Sofort. Unverzüglich."
Literally translated: "Immediately. Without delay."
The press conference was broadcast live on German television that evening. Within minutes tens of thousands of East Berliners flooded towards the checkpoints along the length of the wall, demanding to be let through. The border guards had not yet been informed of the new law, and had no idea what was happening. Eventually they were told, and tried to inform the crowd that they would have to queue up the following morning and get a visa stamped into their passport.
But the crowd were having none of it: somehow they knew the crowd had reached a critical mass, and that there was no turning back. They massively outnumbered the petrified border guards, who made frantic telephone calls to their superiors. Eventually, a guard at Bornholmerstraße checkpoint, acting on his own authority, decided that enough was enough: it was simply unsafe to hold the crowd back, and if he didn't do something there were going to be fatalities.
So he opened the gates, and people flooded towards the wall.
The word soon got out to the other checkpoints, and they released the floodgates. Thousands of East Berliners rushed to find thousands of West Berliners waiting at the wall to welcome them to freedom. And within just hours, the iconic pictures of people hacking away at the wall with whatever tools came to hand were beamed around the world, for all to see: the Berlin Wall had fallen, peacefully. Within a year, Germany had been reunited, and the deep scars of separation could begin to heal.
And that, for me, is one of the amazing things about the collapse of communism: that it all happened peacefully. Almost every other revolution in history, from the Greek victory over the Persians at Salamis in 480 BC, to the communist takeover of China in 1949, have been bloody, and long. 1989 was the great bloodless revolution.
So take a moment to remember that, twenty years ago today, East Germans got back something they had not had for a generation, something we too often take for granted: freedom.
I've always felt my generation has been starved of moments that truly define history: with the exception of 9/11 and the ensuing chaos in the Middle East (not that there wasn't chaos there before), the political makeup of the world hasn't changed dramatically since I was very young. So today, I wish I were just a few years older, that I might remember the most momentous event of the last forty years: the fall of the Berlin Wall.
While tensions had been building for quite some time, and the feeling was that it was a question of when East Germany would collapse rather than if, the sudden nature of the downfall took almost everyone by surprise, including the East Germans.
In fact, it was all something of an accident. For a fascinating, and funny, insight of a western reporter into life in East Berlin when the wall fell, this article from the Sunday Times, an extract from a book by Peter Millar, is well worth a read.
On November 9th, 1989, the East German Politburo agreed to ease travel restrictions on East German citizens, letting them leave and re-enter the country at will, once they had a visa, which would be issued starting the following morning.
However, their spokesman wasn't quite speaking from the same script. Gunter Schabowski was handed the new rules just before a press conference, and announced them to the world. He wasn't clear on the details: he made no mention of the need to obtain a visa, for example, and when asked by a reporter when the laws came into effect, he replied: "Sofort. Unverzüglich."
Literally translated: "Immediately. Without delay."
The press conference was broadcast live on German television that evening. Within minutes tens of thousands of East Berliners flooded towards the checkpoints along the length of the wall, demanding to be let through. The border guards had not yet been informed of the new law, and had no idea what was happening. Eventually they were told, and tried to inform the crowd that they would have to queue up the following morning and get a visa stamped into their passport.
But the crowd were having none of it: somehow they knew the crowd had reached a critical mass, and that there was no turning back. They massively outnumbered the petrified border guards, who made frantic telephone calls to their superiors. Eventually, a guard at Bornholmerstraße checkpoint, acting on his own authority, decided that enough was enough: it was simply unsafe to hold the crowd back, and if he didn't do something there were going to be fatalities.
So he opened the gates, and people flooded towards the wall.
The word soon got out to the other checkpoints, and they released the floodgates. Thousands of East Berliners rushed to find thousands of West Berliners waiting at the wall to welcome them to freedom. And within just hours, the iconic pictures of people hacking away at the wall with whatever tools came to hand were beamed around the world, for all to see: the Berlin Wall had fallen, peacefully. Within a year, Germany had been reunited, and the deep scars of separation could begin to heal.
And that, for me, is one of the amazing things about the collapse of communism: that it all happened peacefully. Almost every other revolution in history, from the Greek victory over the Persians at Salamis in 480 BC, to the communist takeover of China in 1949, have been bloody, and long. 1989 was the great bloodless revolution.
So take a moment to remember that, twenty years ago today, East Germans got back something they had not had for a generation, something we too often take for granted: freedom.
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