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Published: September 20th 2010
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Eventually the scenery changed and the houses, yak tents and beautiful back drop turned into tower blocks, industrial plants and thousands upon thousands of people. On arriving at Shanghai we found that our very unhelpful hotel was perfectly situated 1 min from the Nanjing road. We really enjoyed shanghai the last time we visited but this time found it a lot less enjoyable. The heat has been almost unbearable and the people are multiplying by the minute. It is heaving everywhere. We have lost our patience somewhat with the Chinese people and are finding the spitting and pushing difficult to put up with. Shanghai is an expensive city and last night we paid £17 for 2 beers. It is a great place for shopping but as we are in no position to buy tons of stuff we are not that interested. Last time we were here we loved bartering for watches and going down the back streets to find them but this time we are not interested and have come up with a new strategy to fend of the salemen/women who hound anybody with white or black skin to buy “bagga and watcha” we totally and absolutely blank them and look
right through them. If you say no they follow you, if you look at their sheet of goods they follow you and talk to you too. They want you to go with them down a back street to but their goods in tiny room which they lock once you’re in it. The other day one man would not leave us alone and we happened to be walking in the same direction as his little illegal shop so he thought we were going with him but we weren’t so once again he shoved his card of goods in our faces and so I took it from him and marched off in the other direction. All of his friends were laughing at him because I had folded it up into a small square and he couldn’t get it. I eventually threw it back to one of his friends but he was the laughing stock for a while.
It seems internal tourism has grown greatly since we were last here and there are Chinese tour groups everywhere following small flags and umbrellas. In the Nanjing road there are lots of Luxury Chinese food shops and they are constantly heaving from the start
of the day until midnight. They buy boxes and boxes of food to take home with them but we can’t really see what all the fuss is about. They queue for hours in the sun to buy a small cake or bun.
The shanghai Expo is huge business here with official merchandise shops everywhere selling the small blue mascot/emblem. The sight for the Expo is huge and it is said to have cost more than the Olympic Games cost Beijing to host. Each country has a pavilion which is usually a building of some sort which is used to showcase the best of a country. Some countries spend millions on their pavilions both in and out whereas others concentrate on either the inside or the outside. The U.K pavilion was amazing and really different to any other pavilion at all. It was called the seed cathedral and was made up of thousands and thousands of fibre glass strands so that from the outside it looked like some kind of giant fur ball. You could walk inside and then at the end of each strand were different seeds from Kew gardens. It was very stylish and clever and so different
to everything else but inside there was no show casing of the United Kingdom. We were hoping for some British food because in other pavilions they had restaurants and pubs etc. The French Pavilion had a 2 star Michelin restaurant with prices that were 7 times cheaper than they were in Paris. We ate in The Belgium Pavilion and drunk Belgium beer it was heaven.
It was here at the Expo that we finally decided that we had had our fill of the Chinese. The queue for each pavilion were huge and the UK one said it had a hour wait. We didn’t realise at this time that Citizens were allowed in the VIP entrance to their own country and we had queued for 2 hours in the mid day sun with the Chinese pushing and shoving with their sun parasols. A French family on their 3rd visit to the Expo told us about it and said that if we could get them into the UK pavilion they would get us in the French one and so 2 minutes later we were back in the U.K with no queuing required A passport had been designed for visitors to buy
to get stamps from each pavilion that you visited. This in itself is a nice idea and nothing new in the Expo world but the Chinese grown up adults were running around the Expo from pavilion to pavilion getting stamps. Africa was in one large building with small displays and areas for each country were all around like a large exhibition hall. The people with passports became obsessed with collecting stamps but this meant that they stopped looking at the pavilions and stands and just charged for the stamping queue. We were in Namibia talking to a Namibian native woman and she was saying how the mad the Chinese were about the stamps and how they didn’t even know what country they were in when a stampede of stamp hunters came thundering up to her desk miming they wanted a stamp but when we looked down she had already had Namibia and didn’t even know it. Lots of the different countries seemed to be exasperated by this obsession. Some pavilions made you look around and only gave a stamp on exit so some Chinese would run around the pavilion without looking to get to the exit just for their stamp.
This was very infuriating. What with the heat, queues and pushing we decided we couldn’t face another day at the Expo. We saw, UK, Denmark, Spain, Africa, South Africa, Canada, France, Argentina and Belgium. There were thousands more and the buildings all looked so amazing and at night they all lit up in different ways but we were truly exhausted and could not face another day.
We have managed to do our washing, send home a package, buy our ferry tickets to Japan and have a rest whilst we have been here so it has not all been in vain and last night we managed to find the place that we had visited 3 years ago and had a fantastic Thai meal. We had been searching for 3 days and finally found it by accident. So as we leave China we find that we have loved Beijing more than shanghai this time whereas last time it was the other way around. China is a great country with lots to see but we are ready now to leave and begin the next stage of our trip. Japan here we come!!
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anonymous
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£17 for two beers? Guess it must have been a sober time!!