Took a morning train to Shanghai (上海) and got to our hotel, which ended up being a number of studio apartments that the owner rents. It was a very nice room and in a perfect location next to the subway station, however there was no internet (which is why I fell behind on my blog and am now catching up). After we got settled we took a little break from traveling, even though it was only a couple hours on the train, each leg seems to take longer to recover from. Something that I don't think I have mentioned before, but think this would be a good time because this hotel took it to an extreme, is the see through doors or walls in bathrooms in China. Almost every hotel we have stayed at has at least a window with no curtains that goes to the bathroom, sometimes the entire door is glass, but this hotel the door and wall were all glass. Normally I don't care because it is just Charlotte and myself, but I have no clue how businessmen would travel together and not care. While I say I normally don't care I had to do something about this because as much as I don't need privacy from Charlotte I didn't like the idea of having to watch anyone go to the bathroom while I was watching TV, so I pushed a large armoire in front of the glass wall.
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| From 77 Days in China |
View of the bathroom from the bed after I had already pushed the armoire halfway across the window
Around 1pm we saw some large rainclouds and came up with a plan. Shanghai is currently holding a World Expo, which is basically a place for countries to create a building and show off their country. Japan held it a couple years ago, so now China's main goal is to have more tourists visit it than Japan did. During July they averaged 400,000 tourists a day. Our plan was that hopefully it would start raining and scare people home and we could get in with less people if we dont mind the rain. Equipped with our umbrella's and pocket ponchos we took off.
Shanghai Expo
When we exited the subway stop for the Expo, it was pouring rain and everyone was trying to hide inside the station. We walked through huge ankle deep puddles in the parking lot to get to the ticket booth and got 2 tickets. As we entered, the rain already started to let up, but it seems our plan worked because the Expo was not nearly as crowded as we thought it would be. Now "not crowded" means only probably 200,000 people there, so there was still no chance of getting into some of the more popular buildings like Saudi Arabia, Japan, US, Canada or most European countries which consistently have lines up to 4-6 hours to get in. After seeing a couple buildings we couldn't understand why anyone would wait on line that long. As Charlotte described it as a larger version of Epcot Center(佛州迪士尼世界度假區愛波卡特主題樂園), which is not a glowing review, but some countries pavilions had food and beer from their countries so that made us happy. We started off going to Morocco's pavilion as the line seemed short and it was a country we want to visit. After visiting their pavilion Charlotte decided it is a boring country.
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| From 77 Days in China |
China Pavilion
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| From 77 Days in China |
Wet inside the China Pavilion
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| From 77 Days in China |
Charlotte in front of the United Arab Emirates
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| From 77 Days in China |
Front of Morocco
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| From 77 Days in China |
Inside Morocco
A Taste of Home
Now this might not make a lot of sense to people who don't know us or work with us, but the second pavilion we went to was the Sri Lanka Pavilion. One of our advisers at UCLA is from Sri Lanka and we went to take pictures for her and to learn what we could about the country. This actually turned out to be one of the better laid out buildings with a good mix of sculptures, pictures and text describing the history of the country without trying to be super innovative with crazy touch screens or movies. In addition they had an area serving Sri Lankan food and after 2 months on the road, unlike taking breaks to eat US food like KFC which we could eat anywhere in the world, eating the Sri Lankan food really made us feel homesick for LA as our adviser constantly is hosting parties and bringing us food at work. There were approximately the same amount of people in the pavilion as there are normally at her house too!
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| From 77 Days in China |
Sri Lanka
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| From 77 Days in China |
Inside Sri Lanka
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| From 77 Days in China |
Tasty Sri Lankan food
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About the same amount of people normally at our advisers house
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Don't really know what this guy was demonstrating
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| From 77 Days in China |
The sign on the elephant says "Do not sit", the mother pointed it out to her child before telling him to sit on it for a picture
Rest of the Expo
We spent the rest of the time going to more of the countries that Chinese either hadn't heard of or didn't care about so we could get in pretty fast. We visited Slovakia, Czech Republic, a building with all the Caribbean nations, Cambodia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Brazil and many others, some more impressive than others and the Caribbean had almost nothing in it, Jamaica probably showed the most with a cardboard cutout of Usain Bolt with Bob Marley music in the background.
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| From 77 Days in China |
Pakistan had a cool hologram video
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| From 77 Days in China |
Israel Building
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Charlotte in front of Taiwan, the line was too long for us to get in.
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Australia
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Czech Republic
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We had wine at some country, don't remember which, but it was good
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Chilling with Usain Bolt
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| From 77 Days in China |
The roof of one of the Czech Republic which had a weird art display
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| From 77 Days in China |
Learning about Brunei on touch screens
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| From 77 Days in China |
Brazil assumed they would win the World Cup and a large portion was soccer related
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| From 77 Days in China |
Brazil's outside soccer game had an error
Passports
Some either really smart or very sinister person came up with the idea of selling mainly children, and of course Charlotte, "passports" that they could get stamped at each country they visited. This led to a mob scene as groups of 20-50 chinese children that would run from one country to the next ignoring anything that resembled learning and go straight for the stamps that Charlotte would also fight over. Parents would also send the children alone to lines as they felt they did not have to wait on line and would sneak their way under peoples arms and behind their backs to cut in line and get their stamps faster.
End of the day, US Pavilion
It turned out that if you are a citizen of a country, you could get in without waiting in line. This is of course true for every country except, China and the US! However we did notice that around 10pm, 14 hours after the park opened and 6 hours after horrible rains, there were less people and we might get into the US Pavilion. After about a 10 minute wait we were in. The first stop was a movie where they filmed people (mainly New Yorkers) trying to speak Chinese and failing horribly and laughing at themselves. I don't really know what the purpose of this, but the Chinese seemed to find it pretty funny. Then everyone is shuttled into another room where it is another movie. This time Hilary Clinton started off talking and then some people from GE saying kids really are smart and we should listen to them. Then it went on for 5-10 minutes of kids lecturing the Chinese to clean up the environment, but I don't think many people got it. Finally we got brought into another room where there was...another movie! This time it was about a kid who inspires a neighborhood to turn a trash heap into a neighborhood garden! Then that was it. It was pretty sad display, but still better then the Caribbean!
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| From 77 Days in China |
US pavilion had a restaurant that had ice cream floats
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| From 77 Days in China |
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| From 77 Days in China |
Charlotte and the mascot
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