Better City, Better Life

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After the 2008 Beijing Olympics were over, the next major event China started looking forward to was the Shanghai World Expo in 2010. The Expo is the latest in a line of events that used to be called the World's Fair.

When I was in Shanghai last year, the entire riverfront was closed as they were doing construction and maintenance to prepare for the estimated 100 million visitors the city would get the following year. Most of these extra people are Chinese, and the extra burden on domestic transportation turned out to be very much a spoiler for the rest of my trip. It proved to be quite difficult to get a long-distance train out of Suzhou, since all the train lines through there started in Shanghai, and were sold out much sooner than usual.

Mike and I went into Shanghai together on Monday; I went to the Expo while he met up with a friend of his. I entered on the Puxi (west) side of the grounds, and had to take a ferry across the Huangpu River. This involved the first of several times each day that I would have to cram myself into a very packed crowd of Chinese people. The ferry gave me a good view of the Lupu Bridge across the river, a long and very elevated road and pedestrian bridge which was the centerpiece of the Expo site.

While waiting for the ferry, I got to hear some of the estimated wait times for pavilions. Canada, Australia, France...3 hours. Saudi Arabia, South Korea, UK...4 hours. USA, China, Japan...5 hours. It was at this point that I started to question my decision to spend my Monday with 2.5 million other people. However, these were just the extremely large/popular/busy pavilions. Most of the smaller pavilions had waits of less than an hour, and many were just a few minutes.

Almost every country had some sort of pavilion at the Expo (a few who have no diplomatic relations with China opted out). Some countries had their own building, some shared a smaller building with a handful of countries, and all the smaller Pacific countries were together in one building. Inside each country's pavilion were generally displays of the country's cultural artifacts, famous or important people, some philosophical ideals, and the country's landmarks and scenery.

My goal was to at least see each pavilion, and go inside any where the wait was less than 10 minutes. This meant I went into a handful of the stand-alones, most of the medium-sized shared ones, and all of the displays in the Pacific Pavilion. Morocco and Cambodia were some my favorite individual pavilions, but North Korea and Iran were also fun for the novelty. South Korea's pavilion looked really neat, and I was able to watch a musical performance from outside, but I didn't wait through the 4 hour line to go inside. Thailand and Nepal's pavilions had interesting designs, and Saudi Arabia's was probably the most impressive overall. They spent over $150 million on their pavilion, and imported a few tons of sand, some date palms, and an entire mosque from Saudi Arabia.

Another major focus of the Expo, obviously, is China's own national pavilion. The five hour wait didn't fit my 10 minute rule, so instead I went to separate part of the pavilion reserved for each of China's 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions to have their own displays. Each of these was like a miniature version of the national pavilions, highlighting featuring their own self-determined provincial highlights. The best looking, I think, were Zhejiang (designed to look like a bamboo forest) and Heilongjiang (a big ice palace, representing their famous Ice Festival), and Shaanxi, Tibet, and Yunnan had some pretty cool cultural demonstrations going on. For political reasons, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau each had their own small pavilions next to the China pavilion rather than being included in China's. Macau was the winner of the "We're Not Taking This Seriously" Award, as their pavilion was designed to look like a giant rabbit.

I had just enough time to finish zones A and B (roughly Asia/Middle East and the Pacific) before I had to leave to meet Mike at the train station to go back to Suzhou. Rather than take the ferry again, I headed to one of the 4 new subway lines (!!) built just for the Expo and ended my first day of Expo-loration (sorry).

I had beaten Mike to the station, and while I was in the departure lounge he sent me a text message that he was on the subway headed my way and it was going to be close. I told him what room our train was boarding from, and even what platform we would be going to. He didn't show up before they started boarding, so I got on the train and waited. The train started moving and there was still no Mike to be seen (so begins a flurry of transportation mishaps...more on that later). He finally called me and told me he had gotten to the gate "a mere 10 minutes early" and so they wouldn't let him board. This was unheard of, but we chalked it up to the new super-fast trains (only 30 minutes from Shanghai to Suzhou) and them not wanting to let "late" ("not early enough") people delay the trains.

Fortunately, he had given me a key to his apartment, and I knew just barely enough Chinese to be able to tell a taxi driver where I wanted to go, and how to get there (it turns out if I had known the name of Mike's housing complex I could have gotten there in about 3 words, but hey...). Mike managed to get on a later train and made it home 3 or 4 hours after I did. So ended my first trip to the Shanghai Expo.

Later in the week, I was supposed to go with Mike to Beijing to spend a few days there before his mom flew in, but we could only get a train there for a day later than we wanted, and I couldn't get one back at all in time to meet Cory and Lacey in Shanghai. So, he went by himself, and I spent an extra day in Shanghai and went to the Expo again on Friday. I'm actually glad it happened this way, because it was way too big to see in one day and even having 2 days there I feel like I barely had time to see all the national pavilions, and I still would have enjoyed having at least 1 more day to see some of the corporate and theme pavilions. I'll relay the rest in another post.

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Photos

Shanghai
Me on the Shanghai riverfront, with the Pudong district in the background

Expo 2010
West entrance to the Expo grounds

China
China's pride and joy right now is their national pavilion. The wait was 5 hours to get in!

Macau
Whoever designed this, I don't know what they were smoking

Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam
A few Southeast Asian pavilions between South Korea and Japan's huge ones

South Korea
Music inside the South Korea pavilion

North Korea
Interestingly, this was right next to Iran. It was like a Who's Who of hating America!

Saudi Arabia
This pavilion was incredibly huge and imposing. Kind of like Saudi Arabia.

Comments

[Brian]

Macau
Thank you for telling me it was a rabbit. I wouldn't have seen even that in there. Maybe the Hef had a part in designing it.

[Kate]

cool!
enjoying reading your posts and seeing pictures of your trip!