Francesca and Henk-Jan's Backpacking Trip!
Friday, July 9, 2010
QQ Queue
The 9th of July we reserved for the Shanghai Expo 2010. Now we HEARD by reading blogs online and hearing comments from people via the CouchSurfing website that the Expo was going to be extremely crowded with Chinese people who are able to get cheap or free tickets from the government (and even help with their accommodation in Shanghai) so the government can declare the Expo a success from their insanely high attendance figures. In fact, we also read that the government plans to keep 5 Expo pavilions standing after the Expo is over in order to sell the land around the pavilions as being in the “Expo District of Shanghai.” Hmmm… Now wouldn’t it be interesting if the entire bid for the Expo was an elaborate ruse to make an excuse for kicking out the people who formerly lived in the area in order to re-sell the land for inflated prices post-Expo marketing scheme. Very interesting indeed.
Anyways, we came armed with our gaggle of tips from people who went before us: enter on the Puxi side rather than the super-crowded Pudong side; register at the computers before going to pavilions to get some fast passes; make sure and stay until after 5 PM as it gets much less crowded around that time. But I have to say, none of that made too much of a difference. It was an absolute madhouse! We arrived about an hour early because I thought we might be able to get tickets for the China pavilion. Once we were finally let inside I was told by the computer registration attendant that we should have entered on the Pudong side if we wanted to try for those tickets, and furthermore, we should have started lining up around 6 AM. Yikes! That was alright though because we heard the China one wasn’t that great.
We chose to get a fast pass for one of the Theme pavilions and then headed directly to the GM Pavilion to get in line. Now if you don’t know anything about the Expo let me clue you in: There are two main ‘areas’ of the Expo, Puxi and Pudong sides. The Puxi side has pavilions from all the various corporate sponsors – Coca Cola, General Motors, China Oil, China Railway, China everything-you-can-think-of. These pavilions usually have ‘futuristic’ type attractions on display as possible visions of the future. Or they are supposed to anyways. There are also some ‘Case’ pavilions which are for various cities within countries to have their own space. The Pudong side has pavilions from all the different countries. Some of the countries show the way their country uses green technologies to make a vision of the future. Some of the countries use their space as pure travel advertisement. A few of the countries flat out printed their national travel agent websites images/descriptions and put them all over their walls and that was it. There were a TON of pavilions. HUNDREDS.
WARNING TO ALL: THE EXPO IS DESIGNED FOR AND INTENDED FOR THE CHINESE PEOPLE. ATTENDENCE TO THE EXPO HAS ALWAYS BEEN PREDICTED AS 95% CHINESE CITIZENS. What does this warning mean? It means that the pavilions are all directed towards a Chinese audience. The vocals and captions are in Chinese, usually with English subtitles. But not always. The shows presented are often VERY VERY amateur. While the Chinese don’t seem to be offended, much of the way things were presented was as if the presenter was explaining something to a child. Furthermore, some of what we saw was plain offensive to a rational, educated person’s sensibilities. For example some of the shows/presentations were CLEARLY product placement advertisements rather than anything worth waiting 5 hours for. Which is another point… the lines/queues are absolutely horrendous. It was completely normal at the Expo to wait 4-5 hours for a pavilion, get inside and spend 20-30 minutes inside seeing something not worth your time. While waiting in line at other pavilions we heard announcements over the loudspeakers about 12+ hours lines! AND THEY ARE NOT KIDDING/TRYING TO LURE YOU AWAY.
Alright, back to our day. The first pavilion we went to was the General Motors pavilion. If you go to the Expo, definitely go to this one. It is one of the few that is worth your time. GM presented a vision of the future (2030) where cars will automatically drive themselves while you relax inside. You don’t deal with traffic; just let the car know where to go. Cars will be able to ride up the sides of buildings like elevators and ‘park’ outside your apartment/office like old-school air-conditioners, letting you off directly onto your floor. This means children can be sent off in a car to their friends’ house by themselves and parking will be automatically done for you into a giant wheel of cars in parking garages. Sound ridiculous? It was GM who presented the National Highway System in the USA as a potential plan at a World’s Fair/Expo years ago as well. After watching the video on the concept cars we were presented with the cars themselves and some dancers/presenters testing them out. Fun to watch but you’re still left wondering how realistic this vision is because the cars themselves look a little flimsy.
By the end of the show we were starving and headed to get something to eat at a nearby stand. A chicken sandwich for me and some dumplings for Henk were consumed before we went off to the Pavilion of the Future. This Pavilion was another fun one, large, bright and colorful, and thank God not much of a wait. Although to be honest there still wasn’t as much ‘future technology’ inside as I thought there would be. It was exiting this Pavilion that I remembered another tip I read online – pick up an Expo passport and collect stamps for some of the Spanish cities in order to gain entrance to the Spain Pavilion without having to queue up! Sounded like a good idea to me since the Spanish Pavilion was supposed to be a good one AND have a 3+ hour wait. We went and bought passports and went back to collect our stamps. Next we headed to the Case Pavilions (We walked into a couple of them randomly to find out that they were nothing special at all! It was like looking through the pages of an advertising book on the city…) to get those Spanish city stamps I told you all about. BUT once we got there we saw the lines were much longer than we expected and if we wanted to make our 12:30 fast pass appointment at the other Pavilion we wouldn’t be able to get those stamps then. Grrr…
Instead we walked towards where we thought the Pavilion would be before asking an attendant and finding out the one we had signed up for was actually on the Pudong side, not on the Puxi side. In other words we would have to grab a bus to the other side (they offer them for free) to go to this Pavilion. After debating about it for awhile we decided to go over there. While the Pavilion itself was interesting we discovered once we got there that there was practically no wait. What a waste of a fast pass… we later realized that any of the Pavilions you could sign up for that had fast passes available did so because they already HAD no waits. What a rip-off! Henk and I walked through the rooms which showed us a giant ‘moving-image’ globe which was pretty interesting. Since by now we were on the Pudong side we decided to not make things more complicated and stay on the countries side. I remembered reading that the Pavilions for South-East Asian countries didn’t have long queues so we headed there to see if that was the case.
Turns out it was kinda the case. There were still queues, but at least they were less than 30 minutes each. In the Expo, that is a short queue! Indonesia’s Pavilion looked interesting from the outside so we headed there and walked through. It looked like they took a bunch of museum artifacts and brought them to China to throw in their Pavilion, and there were so many people that you couldn’t stop and read any of the captions. Just move, take a quick picture, and keep moving. At the time we were there, there was also some dancing going on… but again SO many people. Almost 500,000 people attend this thing every day! That is A LOT of people standing around in queues. Another evil trick we heard: try and enter the Pavilions through their exits. Some of them don’t have guards who pay close enough attention to keep you from doing so. We did this for Cambodia (but it was hardly worth it, nothing to see inside!) and it actually worked, but when we headed to New Zealand the place was locked-down like a prison. We bought some ice-creams and stood in the slow-moving queue being entertained by Maori doing the Hakka for Chinese people. After visiting New Zealand (the actual country) however… it doesn’t compare. At all. In fact, the Pavilion told us very little about the country. It had video playing showing how integrated New Zealand families are – which has little to do with the future or green technology.
To clarify why this is an issue, I’ll explain what the purpose of the Shanghai Expo was supposed to be. Like an old-school World’s Fair, it was focused on the ‘new’ and ‘different’ ideas of the world. Furthermore, the Expo was supposed to have pavilions where countries would express the theme of ‘A Green (Environmentally-aware) Future’ showing how their country would use its current/future technology and technological advancements in order to make the world a cleaner, greener place. However, Henk and I concluded that this assignment was lost on more than one of the pavilions completed.
Many of the smaller countries treated the goal of their pavilion as an ‘educational advertising scheme’ and showed the Chinese only what their country had to offer as a travel destination. (Such as Malaysia, Cambodia, etc.) Since MANY Chinese people never travel outside of China (it is very difficult for them to get visas to other countries) they visited these pavilions as if they were going to the EPCOT center in Orlando, Florida rather than a World’s Fair. Other pavilions including many European pavilions (such as the Dutch pavilion, UK pavilion, Italian pavilion, etc.) treated their presentation as more of a ‘modern art’ exhibit which as a result had little if anything to show about their science/technology offerings for the future. And a few pavilions got it right but had some other deficiency in their pavilion that the message itself became muddled/lost (German pavilion was insanely complicated even though it had the right message.) But I think I’m getting ahead of myself now. Back to the show…
After New Zealand, Henk and I headed to the Brunei pavilion since the line looked non-existent. We quickly found out why when we went inside. There was practically nothing in there. A few posters on the wall showing pictures of the country and a small café in the corner (where we bought a quick sandwich to snack on) were the most interesting things to see. AKA nothing. I was really disappointed to see how little we learned from the way certain countries presented themselves. Next was the Philippines, and although they had some interesting interpretive dance on display, again, it had little to nothing to say about the country itself or its ‘green technology.’ Conflicted and exhausted, we made our way over to the Australia pavilion hoping the larger country would have something more substantial on offer. We entered through the exit hoping to catch a break. For one of the few times in China, we actually did! One of the Australian guys working at the pavilion called us over, chatted with us for a little while about what we were doing there, and then let us in the front of the horrendous 2 hour queue! YES! How awesome, all Australians out there!
Even just walking through the pavilion we felt like we were still in a queue… my GOD it felt like permanent queuing the enter EXPO! There were hundreds of Chinese people everywhere. We tried to take some pictures and made our way to the show at the end of the pavilion. The show started out with a large fake sandbox in the center of the room. A screen appeared around the sandbox with 3 little kids of 3 different races who all resided in Australia – a Chinese, an Aboriginal, and a White person. Then proceeded a show aimed at explaining to the Chinese people as if they were 4-year-old children some information about Australia. One of the redeeming things about the Australian pavilion was a cool ‘air scuba diving’ show we saw back at the exit when we left which looked like an attempt at some Cirque Du Solei. Had nothing to do with the theme (yet again) but at least it wasn’t totally boring! (Hey, this is China, you have to take what you can get and pretend you’re not getting completely ripped off in the process if you want to keep your sanity.) We quickly looked at the Thailand pavilion and the Singapore pavilion in the area, but both of the lines were too long (2+ hours) to keep us interested in staying.
Instead, we went into the Malaysia pavilion (which had some dancing outside of it, but not much of interest inside) and then headed towards the Portugal pavilion for a change of pace. For one of the first times so far at the EXPO we felt like a pavilion really got the goal! When we entered this pavilion, we read on the wall: “Portugal wants to reach the target of 7.6 tonnes of CO2 emissions per capita in 2020, which is the most ambitious objective in Europe 15. This effort is accompanied by the measures of the National Energy Efficiency and Electricity Mobility Plan which will help the country to reach the target of 60% renewable energy used in the production of electricity.” FINALLY someone told us what their country was going to personally do, as a goal for the future, to help the environment! The pavilion showed us a video that went through the 5 elements (earth, air, water, fire, metal) and explained for each element something that Portugal is going to do for the environment’s benefit. For example, by 2020, 40% of Portugal’s electricity will come from water! They also had a solar-powered car on display as an example of what their country could produce to aid the pro-environment effort.
Next we entered Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Belarus, and xyz. Slovakia had some ‘ headless dummies’ of traditional Slovakian clothing you could pose at and take pictures plus a few images of their country/religious ornaments – but nothing of great interest in there. Czech Republic must have been pretty boring as well since we have almost no pictures of anything that was inside! (And you’re allowed to take pictures.) Belarus had a colorful ‘mural’ on the side of their building that was like a giant cartoon – but it was xyz that really took the ‘child-like’ cake with their children-drawings and model toy train motif for their pavilion. Once we finished these it was after 5:00 PM and the lines getting slightly less crowded, the EXPO starting to calm down slightly. SLIGHTLY. There were two buildings filled with smaller European countries (Georgia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, etc.) that I wanted to run around and get some stamps/pictures for (I have to admit, I some point throughout the day I think I got addicted to the passport stamping! Absolutely disgraceful, considering I was shaking my head at the Chinese for their seemingly stamp-only obsession for the majority of the day. Damn my addictive personality!!
Henk attempted to get something to eat while I was doing this but sadly the Chinese people continue to be mean with foreigners. He ordered some noodles and then proceeded to wait 20+ minutes while everyone around him who came in later got served first! (And they were all eating noodles as well.) This type of anti-foreigner treatment is rampant in China, with many hostels refusing to let foreigners stay in their rooms, and later as we’ll explain, foreigners even flat-out refusing to even stop their taxi for you because they ‘Don’t want to deal with English speakers!’ We’ve heard plenty of stories from ex-pats (and have personally experienced a few times ourselves now) of local Chinese gathering around foreigners who are having a communication problem simply to laugh at them and ‘enjoy the show.’
Furthermore, if they see a foreigner getting ripped-off they will not step in and help them. Not only are the Chinese nationals notoriously racist, but they are quite mean as well. (At least this generation is for sure!) While this may sound like a drastic generalization (and it is) we have met plenty of extremely nice and hospitable Chinese people who go out of their way to help someone or act friendly to foreigners. But on the whole, especially with the more rural Chinese people, the impression is that they generally dislike foreigners and are personally selfish people perhaps because of their lack of identity. If anyone has any good articles/explanations of this or a refuting statement, please voice it to us!
SO… Henk didn’t end up eating anything and lost his appetite instead over the rude treatment given to him. No longer hungry, we moved on to Hungary’s pavilion which looked quite intriguing from the outside. Inside, we were educated about “Gomboc,” a Hungary mathematical invention with, “…the same feature as the roly-poly, but made of homogenous material… [it is hailed as]… the foremother of all shapes, just like the stem cell is the foremother of all cells.” I read about it online at Wiki and the entry states that gomboc has “… just one and one unstable point of equilibrium…. Its shape helped to explain the body structure of some turtles in relation to their ability to return to equilibrium position after being placed upside down.” We got to play with a model one at one of the counters in the pavilion. Interesting… Anyways, after Hungary were a bunch more of the smaller European pavilions which were quickly looked at by us and then cast aside. So many of them were embarrassingly small and the information so little or vague that it rendered the whole thing pointless. Needless to say, many of these pavilions put out ‘No Stamp!!’ signs to deter the Chinese who were queuing in the pavilions shorter lines solely to collect some quick stamps.
I was excited about seeing my Mom’s birthplace of Guyana’s pavilion in the large joint Caribbean pavilion, but sadly it was closed! Henk and I did have the chance to sneak in however and we got to read about my people! A sign told us, “The first Indian immigrants came as indentured laborers from Chota, Nagpur, Burdwan, Bancoorah, Madras, and Calcutta. Two vessels, the Whitby and the Hesperus were chartered to convey about 414 immigrants. The Whitby sailed from India on January 13th, 1838 with 249 immigrants. It arrived after 112 days on May 5th 1838. The Herperus sailed from Calcutta on January 29th 1838, sixteen days after the Whitby. There were 165 people on board and after a journey of 96 days arrived in British Guyana.” Definitely going to try and do so much research on my heritage after that information!
We went around to the other islands and countries and looked at what they had to offer in their displays – many of them were quite colorful, but not insanely impressive or anything! But then again their funds are limited. But still. Each of them looked like tiny travel agents for their respective countries. Many of the people from these countries who were in Shanghai for the Expo to run their pavilions sat behind their little desks quickly stamping away the local Chinese people’s passports one after another… some looked like they had gotten it down to a fine, but very boring, art. I felt bad for them sitting there with information behind them about their country, knowing that many of the Chinese (almost all of them) didn’t even bother to walk into their pavilions to see the information. Only lined up outside for their stamps! I spoke with one of the guys from St. Kitts, who seemed amused that I was mixed up with all the Chinese people in the pavilion, and he gave me a free little book on the island! Yay!
Next was a long line for the Canada Pavilion where Henk and I ended up having to teach a lesson in manners (that needs to be desperately taught to many Chinese people) to a couple of Chinese kids behind us. They were constantly banging into us, attempting to cut in front of us and in general being extremely annoying brats. And they were laughing in our faces about how rude they were being… grrr! Alerting security didn’t prove to be of any worth, so we instead formed a chain with our arms across the line and managed to successfully block them from cutting in front of us. If you go to anything that involves the Chinese and queuing, this will be a MAJOR problem for you as well! Surprisingly, the Canadian Pavilion also had nothing of note, so we moved on to the Brazil Pavilion. Here we thankfully didn’t have to wait too long and were able to get into their pavilion to feast our eyes on: a bunch of soccer balls in a display net. Whoo-hoo!
Now we got to the USA Pavilion, which we read from an article in the New York Times was horrible; in fact, embarrassingly bad. But the line looked like it was moving pretty fast and I was actually curious to see what was just SO bad about it. Once we got in (the line was actually around 1 or 1.5 hrs so it was longer than it looked) I understood immediately what everyone was talking about. The pavilion was not JUST bad, it was downright offensive to me as an American. The first show was basically a ‘laugh at the expense of ourselves’ show for the Chinese… basically recordings of Americans attempting to “speak Chinese” and drastically failing. It was just embarrassing to watch these Chinese people laugh at the “stupid Americans” who can’t even pronounce “hello” in their language. I swear, they recorded parts of this in New York City it looks like, but it in no way reflected how educated and forward-thinking our Big Apple is as American citizens. Or even just made us look normal or averagely educated at the least.
The rest of the pavilion didn’t get any better… the 4-D show was aimed at children (aka idealistic, boring, and off-topic) and the last section was literally a wall with posters/information about the 34,562 sponsors it apparently took to fund this thing which turned out so horrible. Later Henk and I did some research and found out that what the pavilion put out was literally a ‘last minute’ scramble by our government, because they gave the coordination job to the wife of some big-shot who had a government job and used his connections to get the job for her. Only for our government to find out much later from the Chinese that nothing had been done on the project and the deadline was close. In fact, the United States had to BORROW $6 million USD from the Chinese to complete construction of our own pavilion for the Expo since we were so far behind. GO USA.
After that embarrassing experience, we did a quick run through the Columbia Pavilion, the Peru Pavilion, and then headed to see the Netherlands Pavilion. Sorry to say to all the Dutch out there, but we weren’t impressed with your pavilion either! While the design of it was quite smart (leading to 15 minute lines since there were so many different entries and a large walk-way through the whole thing) the actual displays were to be honest quite boring. There were a few exhibits on Dutch designers and artists, one or two cultural things. But there was nothing spectacular or innovative in the science/ ‘go green’ department. Just a few simple, cute displays on Dutch items. I guess fine for an art or culture exhibit but we were still expecting much more for a World’s Fair/Expo. We left as quickly as we could after that but it was still a long, extremely draining walk/train ride back to P& J’s apartment where we shared our disappointment with them before collapsing into bed exhausted!
Francesca
Anyways, we came armed with our gaggle of tips from people who went before us: enter on the Puxi side rather than the super-crowded Pudong side; register at the computers before going to pavilions to get some fast passes; make sure and stay until after 5 PM as it gets much less crowded around that time. But I have to say, none of that made too much of a difference. It was an absolute madhouse! We arrived about an hour early because I thought we might be able to get tickets for the China pavilion. Once we were finally let inside I was told by the computer registration attendant that we should have entered on the Pudong side if we wanted to try for those tickets, and furthermore, we should have started lining up around 6 AM. Yikes! That was alright though because we heard the China one wasn’t that great.
We chose to get a fast pass for one of the Theme pavilions and then headed directly to the GM Pavilion to get in line. Now if you don’t know anything about the Expo let me clue you in: There are two main ‘areas’ of the Expo, Puxi and Pudong sides. The Puxi side has pavilions from all the various corporate sponsors – Coca Cola, General Motors, China Oil, China Railway, China everything-you-can-think-of. These pavilions usually have ‘futuristic’ type attractions on display as possible visions of the future. Or they are supposed to anyways. There are also some ‘Case’ pavilions which are for various cities within countries to have their own space. The Pudong side has pavilions from all the different countries. Some of the countries show the way their country uses green technologies to make a vision of the future. Some of the countries use their space as pure travel advertisement. A few of the countries flat out printed their national travel agent websites images/descriptions and put them all over their walls and that was it. There were a TON of pavilions. HUNDREDS.
WARNING TO ALL: THE EXPO IS DESIGNED FOR AND INTENDED FOR THE CHINESE PEOPLE. ATTENDENCE TO THE EXPO HAS ALWAYS BEEN PREDICTED AS 95% CHINESE CITIZENS. What does this warning mean? It means that the pavilions are all directed towards a Chinese audience. The vocals and captions are in Chinese, usually with English subtitles. But not always. The shows presented are often VERY VERY amateur. While the Chinese don’t seem to be offended, much of the way things were presented was as if the presenter was explaining something to a child. Furthermore, some of what we saw was plain offensive to a rational, educated person’s sensibilities. For example some of the shows/presentations were CLEARLY product placement advertisements rather than anything worth waiting 5 hours for. Which is another point… the lines/queues are absolutely horrendous. It was completely normal at the Expo to wait 4-5 hours for a pavilion, get inside and spend 20-30 minutes inside seeing something not worth your time. While waiting in line at other pavilions we heard announcements over the loudspeakers about 12+ hours lines! AND THEY ARE NOT KIDDING/TRYING TO LURE YOU AWAY.
Alright, back to our day. The first pavilion we went to was the General Motors pavilion. If you go to the Expo, definitely go to this one. It is one of the few that is worth your time. GM presented a vision of the future (2030) where cars will automatically drive themselves while you relax inside. You don’t deal with traffic; just let the car know where to go. Cars will be able to ride up the sides of buildings like elevators and ‘park’ outside your apartment/office like old-school air-conditioners, letting you off directly onto your floor. This means children can be sent off in a car to their friends’ house by themselves and parking will be automatically done for you into a giant wheel of cars in parking garages. Sound ridiculous? It was GM who presented the National Highway System in the USA as a potential plan at a World’s Fair/Expo years ago as well. After watching the video on the concept cars we were presented with the cars themselves and some dancers/presenters testing them out. Fun to watch but you’re still left wondering how realistic this vision is because the cars themselves look a little flimsy.
By the end of the show we were starving and headed to get something to eat at a nearby stand. A chicken sandwich for me and some dumplings for Henk were consumed before we went off to the Pavilion of the Future. This Pavilion was another fun one, large, bright and colorful, and thank God not much of a wait. Although to be honest there still wasn’t as much ‘future technology’ inside as I thought there would be. It was exiting this Pavilion that I remembered another tip I read online – pick up an Expo passport and collect stamps for some of the Spanish cities in order to gain entrance to the Spain Pavilion without having to queue up! Sounded like a good idea to me since the Spanish Pavilion was supposed to be a good one AND have a 3+ hour wait. We went and bought passports and went back to collect our stamps. Next we headed to the Case Pavilions (We walked into a couple of them randomly to find out that they were nothing special at all! It was like looking through the pages of an advertising book on the city…) to get those Spanish city stamps I told you all about. BUT once we got there we saw the lines were much longer than we expected and if we wanted to make our 12:30 fast pass appointment at the other Pavilion we wouldn’t be able to get those stamps then. Grrr…
Instead we walked towards where we thought the Pavilion would be before asking an attendant and finding out the one we had signed up for was actually on the Pudong side, not on the Puxi side. In other words we would have to grab a bus to the other side (they offer them for free) to go to this Pavilion. After debating about it for awhile we decided to go over there. While the Pavilion itself was interesting we discovered once we got there that there was practically no wait. What a waste of a fast pass… we later realized that any of the Pavilions you could sign up for that had fast passes available did so because they already HAD no waits. What a rip-off! Henk and I walked through the rooms which showed us a giant ‘moving-image’ globe which was pretty interesting. Since by now we were on the Pudong side we decided to not make things more complicated and stay on the countries side. I remembered reading that the Pavilions for South-East Asian countries didn’t have long queues so we headed there to see if that was the case.
Turns out it was kinda the case. There were still queues, but at least they were less than 30 minutes each. In the Expo, that is a short queue! Indonesia’s Pavilion looked interesting from the outside so we headed there and walked through. It looked like they took a bunch of museum artifacts and brought them to China to throw in their Pavilion, and there were so many people that you couldn’t stop and read any of the captions. Just move, take a quick picture, and keep moving. At the time we were there, there was also some dancing going on… but again SO many people. Almost 500,000 people attend this thing every day! That is A LOT of people standing around in queues. Another evil trick we heard: try and enter the Pavilions through their exits. Some of them don’t have guards who pay close enough attention to keep you from doing so. We did this for Cambodia (but it was hardly worth it, nothing to see inside!) and it actually worked, but when we headed to New Zealand the place was locked-down like a prison. We bought some ice-creams and stood in the slow-moving queue being entertained by Maori doing the Hakka for Chinese people. After visiting New Zealand (the actual country) however… it doesn’t compare. At all. In fact, the Pavilion told us very little about the country. It had video playing showing how integrated New Zealand families are – which has little to do with the future or green technology.
To clarify why this is an issue, I’ll explain what the purpose of the Shanghai Expo was supposed to be. Like an old-school World’s Fair, it was focused on the ‘new’ and ‘different’ ideas of the world. Furthermore, the Expo was supposed to have pavilions where countries would express the theme of ‘A Green (Environmentally-aware) Future’ showing how their country would use its current/future technology and technological advancements in order to make the world a cleaner, greener place. However, Henk and I concluded that this assignment was lost on more than one of the pavilions completed.
Many of the smaller countries treated the goal of their pavilion as an ‘educational advertising scheme’ and showed the Chinese only what their country had to offer as a travel destination. (Such as Malaysia, Cambodia, etc.) Since MANY Chinese people never travel outside of China (it is very difficult for them to get visas to other countries) they visited these pavilions as if they were going to the EPCOT center in Orlando, Florida rather than a World’s Fair. Other pavilions including many European pavilions (such as the Dutch pavilion, UK pavilion, Italian pavilion, etc.) treated their presentation as more of a ‘modern art’ exhibit which as a result had little if anything to show about their science/technology offerings for the future. And a few pavilions got it right but had some other deficiency in their pavilion that the message itself became muddled/lost (German pavilion was insanely complicated even though it had the right message.) But I think I’m getting ahead of myself now. Back to the show…
After New Zealand, Henk and I headed to the Brunei pavilion since the line looked non-existent. We quickly found out why when we went inside. There was practically nothing in there. A few posters on the wall showing pictures of the country and a small café in the corner (where we bought a quick sandwich to snack on) were the most interesting things to see. AKA nothing. I was really disappointed to see how little we learned from the way certain countries presented themselves. Next was the Philippines, and although they had some interesting interpretive dance on display, again, it had little to nothing to say about the country itself or its ‘green technology.’ Conflicted and exhausted, we made our way over to the Australia pavilion hoping the larger country would have something more substantial on offer. We entered through the exit hoping to catch a break. For one of the few times in China, we actually did! One of the Australian guys working at the pavilion called us over, chatted with us for a little while about what we were doing there, and then let us in the front of the horrendous 2 hour queue! YES! How awesome, all Australians out there!
Even just walking through the pavilion we felt like we were still in a queue… my GOD it felt like permanent queuing the enter EXPO! There were hundreds of Chinese people everywhere. We tried to take some pictures and made our way to the show at the end of the pavilion. The show started out with a large fake sandbox in the center of the room. A screen appeared around the sandbox with 3 little kids of 3 different races who all resided in Australia – a Chinese, an Aboriginal, and a White person. Then proceeded a show aimed at explaining to the Chinese people as if they were 4-year-old children some information about Australia. One of the redeeming things about the Australian pavilion was a cool ‘air scuba diving’ show we saw back at the exit when we left which looked like an attempt at some Cirque Du Solei. Had nothing to do with the theme (yet again) but at least it wasn’t totally boring! (Hey, this is China, you have to take what you can get and pretend you’re not getting completely ripped off in the process if you want to keep your sanity.) We quickly looked at the Thailand pavilion and the Singapore pavilion in the area, but both of the lines were too long (2+ hours) to keep us interested in staying.
Instead, we went into the Malaysia pavilion (which had some dancing outside of it, but not much of interest inside) and then headed towards the Portugal pavilion for a change of pace. For one of the first times so far at the EXPO we felt like a pavilion really got the goal! When we entered this pavilion, we read on the wall: “Portugal wants to reach the target of 7.6 tonnes of CO2 emissions per capita in 2020, which is the most ambitious objective in Europe 15. This effort is accompanied by the measures of the National Energy Efficiency and Electricity Mobility Plan which will help the country to reach the target of 60% renewable energy used in the production of electricity.” FINALLY someone told us what their country was going to personally do, as a goal for the future, to help the environment! The pavilion showed us a video that went through the 5 elements (earth, air, water, fire, metal) and explained for each element something that Portugal is going to do for the environment’s benefit. For example, by 2020, 40% of Portugal’s electricity will come from water! They also had a solar-powered car on display as an example of what their country could produce to aid the pro-environment effort.
Next we entered Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Belarus, and xyz. Slovakia had some ‘ headless dummies’ of traditional Slovakian clothing you could pose at and take pictures plus a few images of their country/religious ornaments – but nothing of great interest in there. Czech Republic must have been pretty boring as well since we have almost no pictures of anything that was inside! (And you’re allowed to take pictures.) Belarus had a colorful ‘mural’ on the side of their building that was like a giant cartoon – but it was xyz that really took the ‘child-like’ cake with their children-drawings and model toy train motif for their pavilion. Once we finished these it was after 5:00 PM and the lines getting slightly less crowded, the EXPO starting to calm down slightly. SLIGHTLY. There were two buildings filled with smaller European countries (Georgia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, etc.) that I wanted to run around and get some stamps/pictures for (I have to admit, I some point throughout the day I think I got addicted to the passport stamping! Absolutely disgraceful, considering I was shaking my head at the Chinese for their seemingly stamp-only obsession for the majority of the day. Damn my addictive personality!!
Henk attempted to get something to eat while I was doing this but sadly the Chinese people continue to be mean with foreigners. He ordered some noodles and then proceeded to wait 20+ minutes while everyone around him who came in later got served first! (And they were all eating noodles as well.) This type of anti-foreigner treatment is rampant in China, with many hostels refusing to let foreigners stay in their rooms, and later as we’ll explain, foreigners even flat-out refusing to even stop their taxi for you because they ‘Don’t want to deal with English speakers!’ We’ve heard plenty of stories from ex-pats (and have personally experienced a few times ourselves now) of local Chinese gathering around foreigners who are having a communication problem simply to laugh at them and ‘enjoy the show.’
Furthermore, if they see a foreigner getting ripped-off they will not step in and help them. Not only are the Chinese nationals notoriously racist, but they are quite mean as well. (At least this generation is for sure!) While this may sound like a drastic generalization (and it is) we have met plenty of extremely nice and hospitable Chinese people who go out of their way to help someone or act friendly to foreigners. But on the whole, especially with the more rural Chinese people, the impression is that they generally dislike foreigners and are personally selfish people perhaps because of their lack of identity. If anyone has any good articles/explanations of this or a refuting statement, please voice it to us!
SO… Henk didn’t end up eating anything and lost his appetite instead over the rude treatment given to him. No longer hungry, we moved on to Hungary’s pavilion which looked quite intriguing from the outside. Inside, we were educated about “Gomboc,” a Hungary mathematical invention with, “…the same feature as the roly-poly, but made of homogenous material… [it is hailed as]… the foremother of all shapes, just like the stem cell is the foremother of all cells.” I read about it online at Wiki and the entry states that gomboc has “… just one and one unstable point of equilibrium…. Its shape helped to explain the body structure of some turtles in relation to their ability to return to equilibrium position after being placed upside down.” We got to play with a model one at one of the counters in the pavilion. Interesting… Anyways, after Hungary were a bunch more of the smaller European pavilions which were quickly looked at by us and then cast aside. So many of them were embarrassingly small and the information so little or vague that it rendered the whole thing pointless. Needless to say, many of these pavilions put out ‘No Stamp!!’ signs to deter the Chinese who were queuing in the pavilions shorter lines solely to collect some quick stamps.
I was excited about seeing my Mom’s birthplace of Guyana’s pavilion in the large joint Caribbean pavilion, but sadly it was closed! Henk and I did have the chance to sneak in however and we got to read about my people! A sign told us, “The first Indian immigrants came as indentured laborers from Chota, Nagpur, Burdwan, Bancoorah, Madras, and Calcutta. Two vessels, the Whitby and the Hesperus were chartered to convey about 414 immigrants. The Whitby sailed from India on January 13th, 1838 with 249 immigrants. It arrived after 112 days on May 5th 1838. The Herperus sailed from Calcutta on January 29th 1838, sixteen days after the Whitby. There were 165 people on board and after a journey of 96 days arrived in British Guyana.” Definitely going to try and do so much research on my heritage after that information!
We went around to the other islands and countries and looked at what they had to offer in their displays – many of them were quite colorful, but not insanely impressive or anything! But then again their funds are limited. But still. Each of them looked like tiny travel agents for their respective countries. Many of the people from these countries who were in Shanghai for the Expo to run their pavilions sat behind their little desks quickly stamping away the local Chinese people’s passports one after another… some looked like they had gotten it down to a fine, but very boring, art. I felt bad for them sitting there with information behind them about their country, knowing that many of the Chinese (almost all of them) didn’t even bother to walk into their pavilions to see the information. Only lined up outside for their stamps! I spoke with one of the guys from St. Kitts, who seemed amused that I was mixed up with all the Chinese people in the pavilion, and he gave me a free little book on the island! Yay!
Next was a long line for the Canada Pavilion where Henk and I ended up having to teach a lesson in manners (that needs to be desperately taught to many Chinese people) to a couple of Chinese kids behind us. They were constantly banging into us, attempting to cut in front of us and in general being extremely annoying brats. And they were laughing in our faces about how rude they were being… grrr! Alerting security didn’t prove to be of any worth, so we instead formed a chain with our arms across the line and managed to successfully block them from cutting in front of us. If you go to anything that involves the Chinese and queuing, this will be a MAJOR problem for you as well! Surprisingly, the Canadian Pavilion also had nothing of note, so we moved on to the Brazil Pavilion. Here we thankfully didn’t have to wait too long and were able to get into their pavilion to feast our eyes on: a bunch of soccer balls in a display net. Whoo-hoo!
Now we got to the USA Pavilion, which we read from an article in the New York Times was horrible; in fact, embarrassingly bad. But the line looked like it was moving pretty fast and I was actually curious to see what was just SO bad about it. Once we got in (the line was actually around 1 or 1.5 hrs so it was longer than it looked) I understood immediately what everyone was talking about. The pavilion was not JUST bad, it was downright offensive to me as an American. The first show was basically a ‘laugh at the expense of ourselves’ show for the Chinese… basically recordings of Americans attempting to “speak Chinese” and drastically failing. It was just embarrassing to watch these Chinese people laugh at the “stupid Americans” who can’t even pronounce “hello” in their language. I swear, they recorded parts of this in New York City it looks like, but it in no way reflected how educated and forward-thinking our Big Apple is as American citizens. Or even just made us look normal or averagely educated at the least.
The rest of the pavilion didn’t get any better… the 4-D show was aimed at children (aka idealistic, boring, and off-topic) and the last section was literally a wall with posters/information about the 34,562 sponsors it apparently took to fund this thing which turned out so horrible. Later Henk and I did some research and found out that what the pavilion put out was literally a ‘last minute’ scramble by our government, because they gave the coordination job to the wife of some big-shot who had a government job and used his connections to get the job for her. Only for our government to find out much later from the Chinese that nothing had been done on the project and the deadline was close. In fact, the United States had to BORROW $6 million USD from the Chinese to complete construction of our own pavilion for the Expo since we were so far behind. GO USA.
After that embarrassing experience, we did a quick run through the Columbia Pavilion, the Peru Pavilion, and then headed to see the Netherlands Pavilion. Sorry to say to all the Dutch out there, but we weren’t impressed with your pavilion either! While the design of it was quite smart (leading to 15 minute lines since there were so many different entries and a large walk-way through the whole thing) the actual displays were to be honest quite boring. There were a few exhibits on Dutch designers and artists, one or two cultural things. But there was nothing spectacular or innovative in the science/ ‘go green’ department. Just a few simple, cute displays on Dutch items. I guess fine for an art or culture exhibit but we were still expecting much more for a World’s Fair/Expo. We left as quickly as we could after that but it was still a long, extremely draining walk/train ride back to P& J’s apartment where we shared our disappointment with them before collapsing into bed exhausted!
Francesca
