Shanghai/上海 Part 1

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During the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday, I went to Shanghai to visit Rachel Mak! My first night there, we celebrated the holiday by having dinner at her coworker's house with her coworker's extended family. The food was tasty and everyone was warm and welcoming. Rachel's coworker's sister's kid (I think?) was super cute and had tons of energy. We ate mooncakes and watched some Mid-Autumn Festival TV special and went for a stroll outside. Unfortunately, the sky was clouded over, so we could not see the moon. During holidays, it's always nice to have the comforting feeling of family dinner, even if the family is not your own.

We started the next day with some Dunkin Donuts! I was pumped... I hadn't had Dunkin Donuts since Boston. I don't think Shanghai is particularly famous for its food, but it is the most westernized city in China. I'm not going home until May, so I enjoyed the real coffee and the Dairy Queen and the western-style toilets with toilet paper while I could! Also there are tons of expats in Shanghai, so I really felt like I fit in, which was a welcome relief. I think that only once did someone come up to me and Rachel while we were in a taxi line with the "Hello! Hello!" bit which gets really tiring during a long-term stay here.

So then we met Rachel's friend Mimi and went to the World Expo together. I was a bit apprehensive about the holiday crowds, but it wasn't nearly as bad as I expected. With the exception of America and a few others, all of the countries' pavilions were very creative and impressive to see from the outside. The wait to go inside most of them was several hours at least, so we generally didn't bother. Luxembourg looked cool from the outside, so we launched a plan to go in through the exit. I, the token confused white person, would go in first and if the guard tried to get me to stop, I would act very confused and only speak English to him. (Rachel's parents are from Guangdong and Taiwan and Mimi is Korean.) It worked great. The guard kept repeating "这是出口，这是出口"/"this is the exit! this is the exit!" and I just met him with a confused glance and some English. He didn't feel like dealing with me, so he just let the three of us go. Luxembourg wasn't that cool inside. Just some perfunctory displays on "sustainability," as the theme of the Expo was "Better City, Better World." It was mainly fun to stroll about and gape at all the awesome pavilions. Russia, the U.K., Poland, Spain and Korea were some of my favorites. The China pavilion was impressive because of its sheer size. We also went in the Vietnam pavilion because it didn't have a line.

After the expo, I headed to an MIT/Berkeley alum mooncake-making event. Well I am not much of a mingler and also it seemed like nearly everyone there was from Berkeley. There were a lot of nicely-dressed twenty-something types who did stuff like banking, event-planning, PR and finance. One older guy was wearing a faded t-shirt and jeans. He was a mechanical engineer from MIT! He and his wife were really nice and down-to-earth and I enjoyed chatting with them. It was cool to see how to make mooncakes. We made the not-cooked kind with basically mochi on the outside and a variety of fillings on the inside.

I then returned to Rachel's abode. She has a nice chair that rolls out into a bed and even had extra sheets and a pillow. Thanks for being such a great host, Rachel!!

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Photos

God Bless America!
You giant corporate steamboat.

Funnel Thingie
On the central walkway.

China
Towered above all of the other pavilions.

Korea
So many letters eveywhere! Some of bits were three-dimensional and stuck out of the building. Mimi, a real-life Korean, is standing in front.