Better City, Better Life

Friday, September 3, 2010

• Taxi to Bund, breakfast at Costa
• Take the walking tour in the National Geographic along Bund stopping into the historic buildings and viewing the incredible architecture
• Meet German girl on the boardwalk who asked us to take her picture; chatted with her for a bit before dad asked her to join us which she declined (he said he felt like he should offer since that’s what I’m like when I’m travelling on my own)
• Took the extremely cheesy tunnel across the river to Pudong (meet a couple from Atlanta)
• Lunch at Din Tie Fun
• Walk to Grand Hyatt, go up to 56^th floor but decide not to go to 88th floor for views over the city
• Taxi to Expo, takes forever
• Expo from 2:30-9:30; visit the following pavilions because they have no line - Peru, Nigeria, Libya, Netherlands, Cambodia, New Zealand, Oman, Pakistan
• Ice cream break at Baccio Café (next to the Italian pavilion), sit next to a friendly Dutch couple
• Dinner at China Food Court where we needed to put money on cards; dad ended up getting two which meant that we had less credit because the deposit on each was 10, kind of a mess; I chose a wonton noodle soup, but dad went for some beef (turns out he didn’t like it and had the same as me)
• At 9pm we made our way to the dock for the boat to the north side of the Expo and found the subway (with some help from a young local girl who spoke English)

Extraordinary expo:

The Expo was something else.  When we walked through the gates after quickly showing our tickets, we thought we were inside.  It turns out we were standing in the entrance area – a huge space with 50-100 entrance gates at the far side, like an enormous Disneyland.  When we did make it inside, there were thousands of people everywhere, mostly Chinese – walking around, waiting in lines, eating.  Dad and I decided that we would only visit pavilions with no queues since we really wanted to experience the scale of the Expo, so we first stopped in Peru.  As we left, I noticed some people having passports stamped and we learned that these were Expo Passports which could be stamped at the exit of each pavilion.  You should have seen the Chinese with these things – rushing through the pavilions just to get their stamps, sometimes even pointing to a specific spot. Apparently, right after the Expo started, fully stamped passports were being sold online for thousands of Yuan.  We actually spoke to a guy at the New Zealand pavilion who was stamping passports who said that very few non-Chinese tourists showed up with a passport.

One of the highlights of the Expo was the signs.  Every queue had signs telling people to be polite and keep the noise level down, but translations from Chinese to English were amusing.  One would think that someone would have reviewed the signs as it was such an international event.