STO: EXPLOring Shanghai

On Monday July 5th, I put a couple of shirts and shorts into my backpack and headed to the subway to take the airport express en route to Shanghai's Hongqiao Airport. The airport express costs 25 kuai, as opposed to the 2 kuai for every other possible subway transit throughout the municipality, and seems to be an almost perfect copy of its Hong Kong counterpart. I looked on the map beforehand and saw that it first went to Terminal 1, then looped back to Terminal 2 which was my destination. However, I had a great scare when after not alighting the train at its Terminal 1 stop, the train retraced its steps and reversed back through the tunnel we had just come. It turns out that the terminals are a full 15 minutes apart but I had no idea and was worried we were going back to Beijing, a 25 minute journey that would have surely caused me to miss my flight. Luckily I did end up at my terminal and made it to the gate with no further adventures, although I was asked to correct an airport menu's English translation along the way.

So my dad works in Shanghai and my visit was to see him and go to the Expo with him. Hongqiao is conveniently located on the same subway line as my dad's apartment, a lot closer than the larger Pudong airport. The next morning would be an early wakeup because though the Expo didn't open until 9, this was China, and crowds would be lined up way before that. Want some fun facts about the Expo? Of course, that's wh

at I'm here for. The World Expo started in 1851 in London and has since run more or less continuously ever few years. Nowadays large internationally recognized exhibitions are held approximately every 5 years, with other lesser exhibitions occurring randomly in between, with another big expo in Milan in 2015. Anyways there's one in Shanghai in 2010 with 192 countries participating. Shanghai actually spent more money preparing for the Expo than Beijing spent preparing for the 2008 Olympics, clearing out a ton of space right in the city on both sides of the Huangpu River and drastically expanding the subway. There's no real American equivalent to this kind of large scale public urban

redevelopment.

Like I said, crowds are big in China. The photo on the left gives a kind of idea of the wait when I arrived at 8:15am, at just one of several entrances to the Expo. All in all though it was pretty well organized and once doors opened at 9am, the lines moved relatively fast. In a culture that doesn't do lines, that's actually saying a fair amount. So we got in probably around 9:30 and went straight for the Chinese pavilion. The pavilions are actually somewhat located based on geography, with different continents in different areas. The planners used this as an excuse to have the PRC pavilion tower over the neighboring Hong Kong and Macau buildings and across the street (or straits) from Taiwan's smaller pavilion. Anyways the line at the Chinese pavilion was already absurd and I decided that rather than wait something like 6 hours for that one place, we'd go see some other attractions that'd have much shorter waits. I had been properly informed about how long some waits would be and how disappointing the inside of pavilions could be. Still I was stunned to see that all the cool pavilions I had heard about - Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia to name a few - had hideously long waits. Here's a picture of the Saudi Arabia pavilion, which does indeed have palm trees on its roof and had a line that stretched for as long as 8 hours. Ridiculous.

So I went and saw places like India, Iran, Timor-Leste, North Korea, Mongolia before heading over to Europe and getting lunch at the French pavilion. Pavilions with restaurants gave you the opportunity to cut the lines if you were willing to eat their food - and pay their bloated prices.

So yeah we walked around and saw the outsides of all the pavilions were seeing, and the insides of many of the pavilions not worth seeing. None of the exhibits were particularly memorable or even educational. My dad stated that the World Expo was an outdated concept, a relic of a world in which international communication and cultural diffusion was much rarer. Then the Expo was a special event with much cultural and technological sharing. I'm not sure what the real purpose of the Expo is now, as I doubt it really generates revenue. Unlike the Olympics, the crowds at the Expo was not particularly international. While Shanghai has reported a 12% increase in tourists this year, I'd be willing to bet that most of those tourists are domestic. Few people would travel international to Shanghai just to see the Expo, but a lot of people might take trains to see what the whole deal is. And it certainly is a spectacle worth checking out if you were say, spending a summer in Beijing.

The rest of my few days there were spent eating good food with my dad (great Japanese food and Xiao Long bao) and seeing the few friends that I had in Shanghai. There were no sketchy cougar bar adventures this time, only good street shopping and long discussions about the differences between Beijing and Shanghai.