Talk the talk

It has always been hard for me to find the exit of a big city. Beijing, which I like, gave me more of the same. In a place that is so rapidly evolving my Lonely Planet, barely two years old, is already outdated. It is still a lifesaver though. If I wouldn't be able to point out the places I wanted to go to I'd surely be stuck in that place where it took me three hours to find out where the railway station was.

Beijingers simply built a huge new one on a place that couldn't be reached by public transport and so fast that a book published in 2007 has no clue of its train schedule that takes me 497km further in exactly 3 hours.
Why can't we do that?
Brussels - Amsterdam, a poor 200 km by train, let's you grow a beard by the time you've arrived. Maybe you can save out an extra shave by now. At least that is what they've promised us more than a decade ago. No wonder I forgot about it. The only thing left to do is selling one of your livers or another organ to pay for the ticket. Sounds like a bargain to me.
So while European politicians love to talk the talk, something they've become very good at, this Chinese Republic realises that you better spend 10 min of your time on the problem and the next hour and a half on the solution.
And their ticket price... not even worth mentioning.

This said, why then, do they produce such crap cars?