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Published: June 24th 2010
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The train from Xian to Shanghai was a good welcome back to solo travel.
I was sharing my compartment with three generations of a family from Inner Mongolia and a Buddhist monk. Who, for the next 10 hectic hours managed to make me the talking point of the carriage. Using my basic mandarin, a phrase book, a rubbish dictionary and notes from my mandarin lessons we quizzed each other. On their own, my five room mates couldn't make themselves understood so our neighbours were recruited and I was discussed in great detail by all parties. It was an utterly unintelligible but very thorough analysis of every aspect of me, a practise which resulted in me laughing somewhat hysterically while old ladies pinched my cheeks.
My travel companions/audience liked my photographs, especially the ones of my extended family, although they were disappointed that I didn't have a photograph of my boyfriends dad (Is that a normal thing to carry round do you think?)! The photos must have given them ideas however, as parents started bringing their children on little pilgrimages to me, to say 'hello' and pose for some photos. Luckily this phase was quiet short lives, and I was
relieved from the photo shoot when all the grandmothers descended and started feeding me seeds, This is quite a big thing in china, and youoften see paths littered with sunflower seed husks. Some of the seeds Iwas fed were flavoured, which was a new but delightful concept. I think it was a competition to see whose I liked the best and not wanting to disappoint anyone or seem rude, I of course had to eat them all.
Finally, my family got off, my monk went to sleep and the grandmothers withdrew. I retreated to my bunk and lost my self in a Thomas Hardy novel; the perfect antithesis to such utter foreignness.
Shanghai, when I got there was nice. It was different to the rest of China. Much more modern but still with some of the green calmness that I'm starting to associate with Chinese cities.
After arriving at the hostel (Mingtown Etour YHA) I had my usual post-sleeper train nap. I had dinner with a french guy from my hostel and some people he found on 'couchsurfing'. We went to their flat, then out for dinner in a weird canteen style restaurant that only served chicken.
Home sweet home
UK pavilion expo 2010 This was followed by a rather surreal trip to the supermarket (Tesco!) for our new friends to buy a bike.
I ended up spending two days at the Shanghai World Exposition (Expo) which my visit coincidentally coincided with. By two days, I mean two full days. Ten hour, walk-till-you-can-walk-no-more days. It was by no means enough time. The expo site area is absolutely enormous. A world of advertisement, seasoned with a dash of culture. One ticket buys you a days entry to the whole site including any pavilion that you are willing to queue for. The pavilions were, in general, magnificent and vaugely set out by world region. I spent most of my time in Asia and the Middle East although I also popped across to Europe for a while. The architecture was just stunning, and really wonderfully varied. The Insides of the pavilions was generally less impressive- just a travel agent commercial and not usually that fascinating. Some were notable however. The South Korean Pavilion was probably my favourite actual building,simply lovely. I liked the Indonesian pavilion, which was had lots of interesting information about Indonesian culture and also the Netherlands, which felt like a children's theme park.
Surprisingly the UK was also nice, it was a massive seed bank in a nice spiky building. I visited at night and it looked very pretty although I didn't really get the relevance to Britain. The Chinese Pavilion was, as I'm sure they intended, very impressive- a massive warehouse with an individual pavilion for each province. The pacific pavilion was nice and relaxed as would be expected and the Indian Pavilion did good mango lassi. The prize for the most utterly surreal pavilion would have to go to Spain, whose display featured a giant animatronic baby which blew bubbles and said “ni hao”. Their pavilion was also made of wicker and had 'please dont burn' notices on it!
The 'Theme pavilion', I really enjoyed. This wasn't for any specific country but consisted of three pavilions; the Pavilions of City Being, of Urban planet and of 'Urbanian'. The displays in each one of these were based on the nature of people and communities in China and around the world. They were nice people-based displays that focused on humanity but also highlighted issues such as climate change, and use of natural resources. Although some of the statistics were not so believable,
Pudong district
The worlds third tallest building (left) and chinas second tallest building (right) the messages were good. In fact, travelling around, I have been generally impressed by Chinas 'greenness' on an individual level. I have yet to see a light bulb that is not energy saving, people turn of lights and AC when they leave a room, there is an abundance of roof top water heating systems and although litter is a problem there is an obvious effort at recycling. All in all, despite the levels of pollution and number of coal power stations,it seems that the Chinese are tackling environmental issues in a surprisingly progressive fashion.
My visits to the expo didn't leave me much time to explore the rest of Shangahi. I visited the Shanghai museum, which was free, and displaced some of my ignorance about Chinese art and culture. I also saw a bit of Old Shanghai, where I visited the Yu Gardens and the City Temple and most importantly tried a green bean ice cream. Finally, I did a whistle stop tour of the Bund, Shanghai's famous riverside walk and the Pudong district, home to the world third tallest building.
Then with aching feet and a stock of tea flavoured sunflower seeds (which I now know to
The esteemed author
Yu gardens, Shanghai be the superior train snack), I boarded a sleeper to Huangshan Shi, a town near Huangshan, the mystical yellow mountain.
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Mummy
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worth waiting for
we returned from Uncle Billy's centenary to find your 2 blogs - all worth waiting for -I cant wait to get to the mystical mountain!