Mike and Ann (We're both contributing to this blog entry) made the pilgrimage to Shanghai Expo 2010 last Friday. For those of you blissfully unaware (what is Expo?), Expo is a modern World's Fair hosted by Shanghai in China. As far as purpose...well...in Seattle we have the Space Needle to thank the World's Fair for. China will have the red inverted pyramid of their China Pavilion and a graveyard full of Hai Baos. Hai Bao is everywhere in Shanghai. Everywhere. Every single park, mall and most hotel lobbies. Posters, billboards, television ads. Plush dolls carried along subway rides. It is pretty remarkable. Ubiquitous smiling blue Gumby.
And it's not just outlandish Hai Bao purchases - Shanghai has gone all-out for the Expo! We rode a subway to get to the Expo, of course - everyone in Shanghai rides the subway everywhere - and we had picked this Expo entrance (I think there are 15 entrances in total, not all on-site, in what must be an effort to distribute the pretty serious pedestrian all-hours Expo traffic) because we had heard that the wait was short (so short! mercifully short!). We wended through the interminable metal railings (fairly empty of people!), slalomed our way from the ticket selling booths to Airport-level security at the entrance (they wanded me down, made me take the pen out of my pocket), and then once through descended to another subway stop. The Expo has its own subway line, three stops just like any stops throughout the rest of the city: two in the Expo grounds and one a ways off at the Expo entrance we had chosen. The Expo, in a similar vein, has commandeered the ferry system: there are four "Expo Water Gates".
Thus we arrived at the expo. Awed, of course, but equally dazed. Evidence of this is supported by our quick entrance into the Ireland Pavilion. We walked up a quiet walkway and into some strange Dublin meets Shanghai art exhibit. It was very odd. From there we quickly backtracked to the main Pavilion only to find ourselves walking uphill and against the flow of traffic. We quickly figured out that we had stumbled in the exit. Undeterred, we continued through the pavilion to the entrance and then headed for the exit again. Unknowingly we had begun by bypassing one of the expo's many lines.
From here we wandered. The line to Canada was moving quickly (some people were running, actually, hurrying to get into an easy Pavilion) so we gave it a shot. It was a fun, red (as you can see from the pictures), very Canadian experience. We were greeted by a white guy on a television screen (the Expo has so many screens!) speaking Chinese. Inside was at first sort of like a dance hall, but with more picture taking - then a room of images of Canada - then a fairly quiet room with slow wide-angle photographs fading one to the next, of a truck driver and a Quebecois vegetable warehouse (we didn't linger long enough to see whatever larger arc the room's exhibit may have had in store) - before finally leaving through a space in the wildly shaped thin-slatted exterior.
Russia and USA were nearby, so we moseyed over for a look. The lines to both were long, the USA in particular, so we were forced to extrapolate from the buildings' exteriors what might be contained inside. Russia was magnificent. The USA, well, less so. It was a terrible, car-dealership-like building. It left both of us depressed and disoriented.
And hungry, it turned out. From there we floundered into a food area fully living up to every Westerner's secret China eating nightmare. Large signs, ambiguous prices, no sign of eating utensils, plates of food sitting out waiting to be grabbed by a member of the dense, pushing crowd. The wooden chopsticks we finally found kept in a warm, moist drawer. We opted for a quick rinse of Purell and eating with our hands fried baozi that we typically bought on the street for half what we thought we were paying, which turned out to be half again what we were actually charged when we got to the front. After barely escaping alive with the questionable soup filled baozi safely in our stomachs we made a quick exit from the region. We used our new found strength to strike out towards the China pavilion.
(Mike and Ann)
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