gone living

i had a "soft sleeper" train ticket booked on the night train tonight from shanghai to beijing, so i could have a few days exploring the sights in and around beijing before heading off on the train to mongolia and beginning my journey on the trans-mongolian railway (as per my itinerary).

but every now and then i cut my timing a little too close and miss my connection. it doesn't happen often, but when you're making this many flights, trains, buses and boats, sooner or later it's bound to happen. tonight i managed to arrive about 90 seconds too late to catch my train, and realized that rebooking for tomorrow probably means missing one of the "must see" sights that i'd been looking forward to in beijing.

but i'll be damned if i'm going to let one night of poor scheduling keep me from seeing the Great Wall of China, so after some quick internet searching, i realized that:

a.) none of the major US-based online ticket websites appear to handle internal china flights very well (if it all). UPDATE: i did some more research, and it looks like kayak.com actually does have good coverage on chinese internal flights.

b.) there is a great chinese website called Ticket.9588.com that is excellent at booking internal china flights, and even is available in english!

so a few minutes later using Ticket.9588.com, i have my flight booked for tomorrow morning from pudong airport, and i'll be in beijing in time for lunch. hopefully i'll get to take the maglev train to pudong airport!