The Shanghai Expo

The flight from Hanoi to Shanghai was nice with the highlight being the coconut milk they serve on China Southern airlines. It was also a bit tense as we worried about the all the coughing people on the plane and how contagious they might be. Upon entering China, everyone must walk through a temperature detector and if you fail the test, they scurry you away in an ambulance to be quarantined. We know from one of our classmates who had this happen on his last trip to China and stayed in a miserable hospital for two unbearable weeks! Worrying sick about it wouldn't help but the flight was also so hot we thought external temperature might begin to affect internal body temperature - all the crazy things that pop into your mind when there's a threat of something terrible of which you have no control over.

We took the immaculate subway to our first reserved hotel of our journey so far. A double set of doors opens only when the train arrives to there is no way to fall into the pit or try to cross illegally. This later proved to be quite scary... Once at our hotel, we met five of our classmates. We then strolled around our neighborhood in the evening marveling at the cleanliness and orderliness of the streets. Traffic lights control flow, pedestrians rarely jaywalk, cycle lanes are separated and motorbike parking has stripes so one can actually walk on the sidewalk unlike in Vietnam where the bikes often prevent the sidewalk from being used for anything but parking, while the street there is full of cars, bikes and the displaced pedestrians vying for space. Here everything is so strangely organized, almost felt like the U.S. We had dinner at a fancy dumpling shop in an upscale retail district.

We planned to go to the 2010 Shanghai World Expo so we headed there first thing in the morning after a breakfast of a rice ball wrapped around a center of doughnut sprinkled with fermented unidentified vegetable, sugar, chili, and dry pork shreds. Getting on the subway was a stampede and Elizabeth and I shoved our way on but Sarah was behind us and wasn't able to get in before the 'door-closing' tune sounded. She shoved her way through the first set of doors but the train doors kept shutting; apparently they do not have the feature where they stay open if you force them as ones we're accustomed to do. If she made it through the first doors but not the second, if she didn't get shredded by the train, she'd get stuck in the pit unable to get up to the platform because the doors are locked until a train comes, by which time she'd be smashed. She wrestled herself out safely back onto the platform and we watched her disappear through the window, hoping she'd be on the next train at the appointed stop. We waited for three trains when we got there but never saw her. We knew it would be a needle in a haystack at the expo so accepted that we would not see her for the rest of the day.

The wait to buy a ticket at the gate was around 3 minutes, but the line to simply enter the place was an hour. Once through the metal detectors, we felt on top of the world; in Shanghai, one of the most fast paced and rapidly changing cities in the world at the long-awaited expo! A once-in-a-lifetime experience. We had heard there were ridiculous lines to get into most of the pavilions and it certainly lived up to this. We waited 45 minutes to get into Pakistan's pavilion, no one of the most popular. The UK had an amazing structure that was not to be missed, so we waited over an hour and a half to see it. These lines are not like the docile lines at the grocery store, but a lot of shoving goes on, cutting, sticky sweaty people touching your arms and legs without noticing or caring, and the worst of the worst - the umbrellas. Short women carry umbrellas to shade their faces from the sun (nothing a wide-brimmed hat couldn't do) and the sharp ends of the ribs jut out at eye level for the non-short people like me. Umbrellas are everywhere, poking my hat, neck, shoulders, and sunglasses (thankfully rather than my eyeballs) and only fold away when the line enters the shaded canopy area (half an hour more into it). Everyone seems to think the tighter you pack into the line and more surface area of your body that is touching another, the faster you will get inside the pavilion. Really insane. An English-speaking girl even came up to interview us about what we thought of the situation. We told her this would not happen in the USA, people would not attend an event where they had to wait between 1 and 4 hours (no joke) to see every single attraction. We spent much of the time walking around looking at the outside of the buildings as there was some really fantastic architecture.

There were pavilions representing countries of the world as well as industry. The China Railroads pavilion was marvelous. They had models of many new stations, bridges, and such (so much built in the last two years) with staggering statistics and captions like "this bridge has the longest span, can carry the most weight, uses so many tons of steel, can handle the highest speed trains of any in the world" or "this station has 5 floors, 30 platforms, serves X destinations, covers X kilometers (the size of a small city)" and the like. To see how much has been built, with mindboggling technology and the sheer size and capacity of things is like watching a movie that is to outrageous to be true. The city of Shanghai represents this - there are cranes galore and so many roads and overpasses look brand new. A super tall highway bridge that spans the entire expo center is painted entirely in white and is a light show as something in Vegas every night. Much of the city is this way. All skyscrapers have flashing/strobing/scrolling/sheetflowing colors of light on the top, the sides, shooting out from the building, or making patterns on the entire visible surface. All the boats on the river save a few barges are colored with lights galore as well. It is really over the top. Most Americans would be disgusted at its gaudiness.

The most uncanny thing happened while at the expo. While wandering around taking it all in, a girl came up behind us and nonchalantly said hi. It was Sarah! In a crowd of 600,000 people that day (the entire population of Boston) Sarah ran into us by happenstance! We were all weirded out and took a picture to commemorate the moment.

We survived a stampede onto the ferry, a crushing crowd in the subway exiting from the expo station, and rewarded ourselves with bubble tea when we got back to our neighborhood. I got "immortal grass" flavor which was delicious. I bought a lamb skewer which was my second meat of the day after the ostrich wrap at the African pavilion.

The next day will be short since I wrote so much about the expo. Again my breakfast was intriguing. A crepe filled with green onion, unidentified fermented vegetable, maybe hoisin sauce, chili sauce, a crispy fired thing, folded up and eaten like a sandwich. We moved hotels to the one where our class was to meet and then walked around the neighborhood on a walking tour our guidebook laid out. The "Bund" and its 1920's - 30's architecture has a rich and colorful history! After a few more photos taken with us by random people spellbound by our white skin and western features, (we must have had at least 20 photo request by now, not counting the covert picture takers who miss out on actually being in the picture with their arm around us) we left the Bund and walked over to the People's Park where shady paths wind, groups of men gamble, and lovers abound. It is a really beautiful park but would never happen in the US. The ponds and water features would be far too dangerous, the beautiful planting schemes with rich understories along narrow paths would invite illicit activity and laugh in the face of crime prevention. There aren't public parks with such nice spaces like this in the US, it's really sad. For better or for worse, good design in the US is completely overshadowed by these issues of crime, safety, and litigation and it seems normal until you see a place where this is not the case.

One more thing: we went to Starbucks. It's really goofy but I was looking forward to it since I haven't had coffee since Vietnam. The place was packed, every seat taken and a line to the door. I was a big-spender on a very overpriced grande drip but enjoyed it thoroughly.

1. Now in China, not only is facebook blocked, so is my blog! I have to use a proxy to write this! And so is grooveshark, the music station I've been listening to while sitting at the computer doing stuff like this and I don't know how to do streaming stuff this way, it doesn't seem to work. grr :-{