Tianjin Day Trip 2010

Nelson rounded up the troops for a day trip to Tianjin while his Hawaii friend Steph was in town. The 'troops' consisted of Nelson and Steph from Hawaii, Lina the eccentric Estonian, Daejin and Bora the kuddly Koreans, and me the tyrannical Texan. I say tyrannical because I was constantly giving orders to my 'models' pretty much every ten feet we traipsed through the city, making them climb on top of monuments, balance awkwardly on very narrow road blockades, and jump up and down in the middle of busy thoroughfares. I have to admit they were the most energetic and cooperative group of models I've ever worked with!

We took the new express train from Beijing to Tianjin, which zips between the cities in only 30 minutes at speeds over 300 km/h! It actually took us longer to get from our side of town in Beijing to the new Beijing South Station (where the train departs from) than it took us to get from Beijing to Tianjin. Pretty awesome. And there are several trains every hour, so it's definitely very efficient to get to Tianjin from Beijing these days (much better than when I had to take the slow two-hour train back in 2007 on my first trip to Tianjin.

We really didn't see that much of Tianjin, as we arrived around 9:30am and left at 6pm. We had breakfast and came up with a game plan, which basically consisted of buying a map and asking some friendly female cop outside the station where the hell us bunch of unruly foreigners should go for a good time in Tianjin. She was super helpful and knew where all the good stuff was, and I told her that she had chosen the wrong profession... she should have been a tour guide, not a police officer. She slapped me, threw me down on the car, handcuffed me, and then.... ok, not really, but Nelson was kind of hoping she would... to him. Anyway, we just wandered around the central part of the city most of the day and took crazy pictures, which was just about the best way I could have chosen to spend a day in Tianjin!