Francesca and Henk-Jan's Backpacking Trip!
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
When Lemmings Exist
By Saturday July 10th we were still recovering and ordered in lunch from Element Fresh with Patricia, our host (Henk had a tuna sandwich and I had a pesto chicken) before attempting to go to the Shanghai Postal Museum. As always with Chinese museums, this one closes an hour before ‘real’ closing time. We weren’t 100% sure of that but we believed it could happen. But it took FOREVER for us to get there. In fact, we ended up trying to take a taxi who didn’t know how to get there after we got out of the train station and arrived at the museum at 4:01 PM after probably about an hour or more of commuting. The museum had just closed and despite our pleas that we would be done in far less than an hour before actual closing time, in fact, we’d be out in less than half-an-hour, no one cared to listen to us.
It seems that Chinese people often take delight in the trouble/inconvenience of foreigners. They consistently smile and laugh when giving us bad news and not in the ‘sorry for your trouble’ way but in the ‘Ha-ha, stupid foreigner got screwed’ way. ANYWAYS, enough of my ranting! I sorted out my student ticket for the Expo for another day (I know, we were actually going to go back!) and we headed back to the apartment. Since there was no Internet (somehow it had gotten cut-off) I spent some time in an Internet Café before returning to the apartment where we ordered some mediocre Indian food and got more desperately needed sleep.
The 11th of July was supposed to be an Expo day but instead we ended up going to the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum. This was much cooler than we expected! But another example of just how many people there are in China. The place was absolutely packed when we arrived (it being a rainy Sunday afternoon) and all of the tickets for all of the shows were completely sold-out. Plus pretty much every exhibit was swarming with crowds of Chinese people in front of them. You had to wait a minute or so before you could even make your way PAST the huge crowds to even see what the exhibit was supposed to be about. Yikes. It was like returning to China’s infamous queues all over again when we walked through the Animal Kingdom hall and it was so packed that the hallway was a ‘stop and go’ walking experience. There were some pretty cool large robot insects/reptiles on display all around though and these helped to lift our spirits.
One of the more fascinating exhibits was on spiders. Of course there was a giant robot spider! There was an example ‘spider web’ that we could play with and another one we could construct ourselves, both which showed us exactly what a spider ‘feels’ in their web. We got to see what it feels like for a moth, fly, wasp, etc. is caught in their web and the differences between them. Furthermore, we learned that each of a spider’s 8 legs is on 1 branch or thread of their web at any time in order to feel these sensations.
But it was the robots section of the museum that we found so interesting. They had robots for everything! Robot ‘archers’ that could shoot arrows from their bow-and-arrow sets (and if you could make it past the Chinese, you could try and shoot one more accurate than the robot could!) and robot artists ‘drawing’ people after taking a picture of them. There were robot gobang players (a Chinese board game) who used computer-generated strategies combined with their robotic arms to ‘play’ the game with you. Even some robotic sword-fighters! There was a robot show we managed to craftily sneak into towards closing time. Twice we attempted to get into the show only to be told it was “too full” to accommodate us. So I decided that I ‘left’ my wallet in the show from last time and obviously absolutely had to go back in to get it. I mean, it’s my WALLET! Show is still going on? Fine, let me in and I’ll wait for it to finish. Sit down and watch the show? Well I guess I’ll have to… in order to wait for it to end. And of course my boyfriend has to come with me. Hehe… by the way, there were TONS of empty seats when we finally got into the show. These people are SUCH LIARS!! The little robot show had a bunch of cool dancing robots and more sword-fighting robots along with a few other things. I think we were most grateful to be able to sit down though!
The rest of the museum was quite boring, some exhibits on rocks and Shanghai’s material make-up. A bunch more interactive exhibits with lines a thousand people long. We left the museum and headed back to P&J’s where we were meeting them to head to a cool Uyghur lamb restaurant they had told us about where you could eat with your hands! (Wearing gloves of course.) Sounded like a lot of fun to us and we jumped in the taxi with them and were off. Once we got to the place the first thing they made sure to do was order a special beer called ‘Black Beer’ for us to try. While it was supposedly a pretty strong beer, it actually tasted quite alright… although if you know me, you know I’m not much of a beer drinker. And then the lamb came! It was awesome to watch P&J explain what food and sides we wanted to our waiter in Chinese. We ended up trying eggplant fries, a plate of mixed salad/veggies, bread… and some amazingly delicious dipping sauce for the lamb itself. You put on your gloves, grab a chunk of lamb from the plate, dip in the sauce, and into your mouth! YUM. We even ended up being pulled into dancing on stage with the traditional dancers they had performing at the place!
That evening Henk stayed up to watch the Spain vs. Netherlands World Cup match, while I joined him to watch the second half. It was on quite late for us 2:30 AM to 4:30 AM or so and we were supposed to go to the Expo again the next day on the 12th. Let’s just say it was a bit of a sad night for my baby (but it was a really close, difficult game!) and we needed to buy a couple of Red Bulls the next morning in order to get through the morning with little sleep and energy. This time we planned to enter on the Pudong side rather than the Puxi side, thinking we’d be able to run for those fast-passes I still thought existed for some of the country pavilions. Wrong idea! Not only were those passes impossible to get, but the Pudong side was an absolutely nightmare. We felt like cattle being corralled around the whole waiting time before entering – like literally, we had stalls we were put in. At least we picked-up a small chair (like the ones we’d seen the Chinese carrying around) for free off the street somewhere that I could use to rest my back.
The first thing we tried to do was go to the Saudi Arabia Pavilion. However, almost immediately after everyone entered the park grounds the waiting time quickly shot up to 4-5+ hours. Insane! Literally the second we got into the park that was already the wait time, and we were in line to enter at the park’s opening time around 9:00 AM. Discouraged by this and our inability to get ourselves to the front of the line, we jumped in line for the nearest pavilion – the India Pavilion – since it seemed to be going quickly. But we were wrong on that, again went much slower than we thought it would. As a personal side note, being ½ Indian, the India pavilion was a real disappointment being a 2 hour wait for literally a couple of small souvenir shops and an Indian girl dancing on a small TV. THEY DIDN’T EVEN HIRE A REAL INDIAN TO DO THE DANCING! Shameful.
We then tried to figure out a way into the Saudi Arabia Pavilion yet again, and actually ended up going into the Syria Pavilion and a guy named Mounir there (actually I saw him and he looked Saudi to me so we started cautiously stalking until he noticed and started talking to us!) who worked in the Saudi Arabian Pavilion who gave us his contact number and told us he would figure out a way to get us in without queuing. Yay! He actually suggested to us to ‘come back when there aren’t so many Chinese around and we’ll get you in’ which would be around 7:00 PM. He thought it would be good if we came not that night but one of the following nights and we agreed excitedly that not queuing would be great! Satisfied with this accomplishment, we then headed towards the Japan Pavilion for a massive 4.5 hour wait. I heard that this pavilion was “one of the better ones” so I thought it might be worth that wait. Anyways, while Henk stood in line, I ran around attempting to find another way in for us. Sadly the whole place was tightly locked down… not even the tall tale of ‘forgetting my wallet’ I had used at the museum was any help there. Not even those people working at other pavilions, who are usually granted special access, were allowed into the Japan pavilion. So we were a bit out of luck.
While Henk STILL waited (I felt bad he had to wait while I ran around) in line I saw a line for one of the smaller pavilions and realized there was ice-cream and popcorn inside. Considering the majority of Expo food was Chinese snacks… this was a blessing! I ended up going into the Vietnam, Jordan, and the Laos pavilions and eventually (I had to keep checking where Henk was in the line so I didn’t lose him!) managed to bring him back some delicious strawberry ice-cream and some popcorn and sodas for us to share. Once we finally got into the Japanese Pavilion, we were expecting something amazing. Sadly we were let down by the Expo again. Once we walked through a few random tunnels and some artistic examples of Japanese houses and their interiors, etc. But none of it was crazy interesting… then came the robots. This was the part I heard was impressive. There was a robot who gestured to us and ‘pretended’ to speak as a human’s voice played in the background; there was a robot that played the violin. But I have to say, it wasn’t impressive at all. In fact, the Science & Technology museum we went to the previous day had SO much more to see and be ‘Wow’ed’ by than the Japanese Pavilion.
Once we got into the ‘pre-show’ area, Henk and I felt like we were seeing a long camera commercial. Two actors on stage showed the audience how to ‘use’ the camera and access pictures via a ‘touch-screen’ wall and there was a little video showing what looked like sit-down Segways maneuvering people around. Wow, the future would be extremely large and lazy if that were the case! We did get to see these sit-down Segways in person after we were ushered into a new room where we sat down for an additional short show. This presentation explained that China gave Japan a pair of breeding crested ibises, an endangered species, as a gift. (Because we all know Japan is SO great with endangered species, read: whales!) In the form of traditional Asian opera, this story was played out to the audience. While this might sound intriguing the result came off as extremely cheesy, and we left feeling like we wanted our 5 hours back! Since it was getting late and we wanted to head to the European pavilions to meet fellow Couchsurfer Ugis, we grabbed the bus away from Japan.
First we had a quick stop (read: 2 hour wait) at the Switzerland Pavilion where we went inside and were disappointed to see the only worthwhile attraction (the chairlift) was broken. But think about it… it is a chairlift!! Who hasn’t been on a chairlift? Only a Chinese person who never gets the chance to go anywhere. Thus not entertaining for us Westerners at all. After quickly scarfing down two hotdogs, we met Ugis who let us into the Latvian Pavilion right away for a look around. Ugis is a Latvian who is working in China for a while who did a lot of traveling and hitch-hiking around. We contacted him through Couchsurfing originally wanting to surf with him, but since he had guests we had to find someone else to stay with. However!! Since he worked in the pavilion he offered us the favor of taking us around to a few of them and trying to get us in the next day when he didn’t have work. Yay! Anyways we got to enjoy the flying people and use the computers to try and enter a contest to ‘fly’ ourselves. Ugis brought us quickly to the Estonia Pavilion before he had to return to work. This pavilion was quite different than the others because it was filled with giant, colorful, plastic piggy-banks. You could write your idea for the environment’s protection (in your home city) on a slip of paper and put it inside the pig.
Henk was getting quite tired after this so I had him sit down for a while to rest his feet while I jumped into a few more pavilions to get some pictures and see if they were anything interesting. The first was Denmark where they had their ‘Little Mermaid’ on display, next was Brussels and the EU joint-pavilion. Here we got some free coffee biscuits! And got to see the famous Manneken Pis! But that wasn’t the best thing about the pavilion, thankfully! This one actually turned out, in our opinion, to be the BEST representation of an answer to the Expo’s question. While there were some pointless diamond stores at the end, this pavilion gave a good combination of country-overview information and examples of each countries’ efforts to improve the environment through new technology. Leaving Belgium behind, we watched some choreographed Western (modern) dancing outside which the Chinese seemed very amused by before going next door.
Serbia! Here we saw some information about Cyrillic script and more importantly another great example of an interesting pavilion. Serbia did a great job giving an informative explanation on their calendar, invented by Serbian scientist Milankovic, which they dub as: “The most precise calendar ever invented by mankind so far, and the one that deviates about 10 times less than the Gregorian [which is the one we currently use] which is only about 2 seconds a year… the Julian calendar loses a day every 128 years, the Gregorian every 3300 years, and Milankovic’s will be late one day after more than 43,000 years!” Serbians explain that their hope for the future is that the world will adapt this more accurate calendar invented by their scientists and thus be more on the same page! For example, if for the past 5000 years we had been using the Serbian calendar rather than the Gregorian calendar, we would currently only be ‘late’ by 3 hours when we are technically late now more than an entire 24 hours! The Serbians cheekily write that by using a less accurate calendar, “Today is actually tomorrow!”
Monaco was next which also quite impressed us for the pavilion’s small size. The main thing to see in the pavilion was an animated video showing the progression of Monaco from the bare rocks thousands of years ago through the 1500’s as a fortress city through present day civilization. The animation was pretty awesome and the story needed no words but was quite entertaining to watch. After the video were a few model cars and information about Monaco’s Formula One racing. It was almost 8:30 PM by the time we finished and we walked outside straight into the nightly parade going on at the Expo. It looked like a lesser, sadder version of a parade at Disneyland and was clearly aimed at any little kids running around the Expo. My God does Shanghai need a theme park or WHAT! Henk and I hit a bunch more of the pavilions after that: Iceland with its giant one-room screen video display of ice, Norway which seemed to have a good display but was illegible from their poor font choice, Ireland with a small room showing video of Irish dancing and some history of Ireland, Sweden with a giant colorful slide (which no one was allowed to go on at that time!) and strange IKEA furniture, Turkey with some interesting displays of their old historical sites and perhaps a couple others that weren’t too special. It was absolutely exhausting taking another long walk out of the Expo site, back into the crowded train, and finally back to P& J’s to crash in bed.
Another day at the Expo, another day to recover. The 13th we desperately tried to recuperate from the second long Expo day by watching the remainder of ‘My Fair Lady’ and ordered in some Papa John’s pizza and side salad for lunch. We also ended up having pizza again for dinner with P& J before we took our bags and headed out into the city. Since it was Patricia’s birthday the next day we contacted and met up with another Couchsurfer, Shawn, who decided to take us in for a couple of nights! He lived in a completely different part of town, so we’d be able to see a different side of Shanghai. We tried to take the train to Linping station but didn’t realize the trains stopped running all the way that late at night and ended up in a taxi instead. Because of all that madness we ended up being at the end station later than expected and had to call Shawn back to meet us! (Sorry about that Shawn!) We went to his place which was in an area with a lot more locals and pretty much crashed after talking to him for a while. He was a Canadian but of Chinese decent who was pretty laid-back about living in such a chaotic city around Chinese people. We learned from him that if you don’t force yourself to ‘go with the flow,’ you’ll be constantly uncomfortable and frustrated in China. Still not easy for your average Westerner, used to a minimal level of comfort, personal space, hygiene, and a little friendliness from other people!
The next morning we were off to the Expo again! (I know, you are thinking, WHY would they go for 3 entire days!!) We were pretty tired of the Expo, its heat, the long lines and rude Chinese people… but Ugis promised he’d meet up with us that day and help relieve us of some waiting lines and we were banking on that making the situation much more manageable. We took the train to South Xizang and bought some raisin buns on the way. This time we started at Puxi again after buying our tickets and started on the corporate side with the Coca-Cola Pavilion. Before we could get anywhere the line was already 4+ hours long! Remember, we aren’t coming into the park late. We are there when the doors open!! Henk stood in line while I ended up having a little adventure of my own… (Sadly without him, someone had to hold down the fort after all!)
Henk sent me over to the Space-Home Pavilion thinking if the line was a lot shorter than the Coca-Cola one, I could call him over and we would go straight into that one instead of waiting in the 4+ hour line. However, it wasn’t. It was like a 5+ hour wait. And everything around it was EVEN LONGER. We are talking 6+ hour lines at the beginning of the day at the Expo. ALREADY. Insanity! I wanted to see the inside and decide for myself if the pavilion was really worth that long of a line, and I didn’t want to have Henk and I stand in line for something for 5+ hours if it wasn’t worth it. I decided to try my sneaky technique again of having ‘forgotten my wallet’ inside the pavilion. Interesting, either due to their misunderstanding of English or my own awesome skills (let’s say skills) they ended up asking if I had forgotten my pass, but wanted to see their pavilion. I agreed that sure, I did, believing they meant wallet.
Quickly I realized they thought I was a pavilion employee as well who had simply forgotten her employee pass to get inside! I went with it and decided that Ugis was a close-enough new friend of mine that I could say I was from the Latvian Pavilion but didn’t have my pass… and they brought me through the employee/VIP entrance and I got to see the pavilion! Which was complete and utter crap. In fact, there was practically nothing in there and no English captions whatsoever. I think I would have kamikaze’d myself if a 5 hour wait in line had proceeded that disaster. Not willing to let my new employee status go to waste, I convinced one of the guys in charge at the Space-Home Pavilion that I was indeed an employee who not only forgot her pass, but was very bad with directions and would need a personal employee-escort to another pavilion nearby… quickly, while I was still on my break.
And I actually ended up with one! He assigned someone to take me on the bus over to one of the Theme Pavilions. Unfortunately, it somehow got lost in translation (which is a mystery to me how that happened, since they both speak Chinese!) between her and her boss that I was an employee who didn’t have my pass. She thought I’d simply been someone who needed help finding a pavilion. SO, I went to an emergency plan B. When she brought me up to the employees working at the Theme pavilion, I tried to explain to them that I had forgotten my employee pass and wanted to see the pavilion. THIS time they mistake me saying ‘pass’ for meaning ‘wallet!’ WOW! Convinced I had left my wallet inside, these guys let me in through the VIP entrance as well and I got to see another pavilion. This pavilion however, was ALSO complete junk! It was like a Chinese/Western museum storehouse but with replicas rather than the real things. Plus it was huge and little message managed to make it through the display’s madness. Once I was done with all this… well, remembering that amazing guy I’m dating? Yeah he was still standing this entire time (the past 2 ½ hours!!) in the line for the Coca-Cola Pavilion. Ack! I felt SO bad… and went running back to rejoin him as fast as I could. He was amused by my story and admitted he was wondering why I had been gone for so long. Thank God both of the pavilions were horrible so there was nothing he missed out on.
We still had another couple hours to wait for the Coca-Cola Pavilion and kept ourselves amused by taking pictures of/with some of the little Chinese kids gathering around us in line. FINALLY we made it inside the pavilion to watch an interesting little animated video on the ‘inside’ of your average Coca-Cola vending machine aka in ‘The Happiness Factory.’ There were these cartoon characters who explained just how a bottle of Coke goes from their vending machine to your hands! And this involves using a large flying pig called a ‘Chin-Oink’ (helicopter) to deliver the soda. After the video we were brought into a room where we were given mini Coca-Cola bottles and told a specific method to open them. Twist the cap off slightly, then tighten it, then turn the bottle upside down and back around before finally opening the bottle. Somehow all this effort is supposed to ‘activate’ the bottle, making the soda become naturally colder instantly. Henk and I tried this effort first with his bottle that was already somewhat cold then later in the day with my bottle once it had become luke-warm. Neither time did we notice too much of a difference though!
Next we popped into the China Railway Pavilion where we found a ticket machine for buying train tickets. Since we were supposed to leave for Nanjing the next morning we tried to buy some tickets but ended up getting a bit confused about which railway station we’d have to leave from. Instead we went to find a bathroom (don’t even get me started on Shanghai Expo bathrooms!) We also went into the xyz Pavilion which didn’t really stand out to us. By this time (around 3:00 PM) we went to go meet up with Ugis back on the country-side (Pudong) outside of his Latvia Pavilion. He was luckily off for the rest of the day and offered to spend the next few hours helping us get into pavilions! So awesome of him.
We went to the Spain Pavilion first which had flamenco dancing, interesting video and 4-D effects, and a giant, creepy baby at the end! One of the better pavilions, we were glad to have seen it. Next we headed to the Germany Pavilion which had a LOT of information (too much to actually stop and read) and a show at the end where the crowd yelled and ‘made’ a giant ball move around with their voices. Not too interesting, and the show was aimed towards a much younger crowd. We then hit the UK Pavilion which looked strange from the outside and once we got closer we realized why. It was called the ‘Seed Pavilion’ and each of the 60,000 long acrylic rods had a small seed at the end of it. I think the entire pavilion was supposed to represent a seed as well. Regardless… that was IT. Yeah, pretty boring and not worth a gazillion hour wait for sure. Sure didn’t say anything about future tech for the environment. The ground was so slick and slippery (it had started raining) that I slipped and fell at this pavilion. One thing about China is it rains A LOT and you need to have really good shoes because the Chinese government consistently builds things using this really smooth material that becomes a pure waterslide when it gets wet. I really don’t know which ‘genius’ designed this one but it makes any smooth track become impossible to walk on without ‘skating’ over the layer of water that builds up on it.
The Italian Pavilion was next and as I stated before it was basically a strange fashion/art gallery with clothing and musical instruments on the walls and a giant statue of a high-heel in the middle of the floor. Hardly anything had ANYTHING to do with science. There were one or two tech-based inventions but again nothing very innovative. After Italy we headed to the MeteoWorld Pavilion, one of the supposedly-interesting tech pavilions which turned out to be a complete flop. There was a 4-D film about the weather that was neither entertaining nor fascinating. We decided to go for the Singapore and Thailand Pavilions next, making our way closer to the exit. Singapore had some food displayed on video monitors and a garden on the top level but surely wouldn’t have both worth any wait. Thailand was actually much more exciting. We saw a video once we entered and then moved into a room with a giant robotic temple guardian statue. Next we saw a 4-D video that was much more action-packed than anything else we had seen up to that point. But then again this could be a misguided view from us since most of the rest had been just so bad!
The rest of the time we didn’t end up getting into any more pavilions. It seems that the rules on the ‘other’ side of the Expo center were much more enforced (only those with passes themselves are supposed to get through, not their ‘friends’) and the UAE Pavilion, South Korea Pavilion, and Taiwan Pavilion all rejected us. We did eventually meet up with our buddy Mounir from the Saudi Arabian Pavilion who actually said it really would be no problem to get us in, but not on that night either! Apparently some Prince from Saudi Arabia was coming to see the Expo Pavilion and everyone was a bit on edge as a result. At least he exchanged contact info with Ugis and Ugis would be able to get in himself at some point. To try and make-up for rejecting us entry, Mounir and his friend gave us little token Saudi Arabia pins as souvenirs. It was sad that we couldn’t see the pavilion that night, but it was nice of them to try and we were glad to ‘return’ the favor to Ugis by putting him in contact with someone to get him in! (Expo workers are also not ‘allowed’ to jump the line at the Saudi Pavilion either.)
By this time Henk and I were pretty much done with the Expo. While Ugis had to run and we still had a little Expo time we could take advantage of, we decided that we had seen almost all of the so-called “great” Expo pavilions and had for the most part not been very impressed. When the pavilions were bad, they were completely horrible wastes of time and even offensive to the sensibilities for making you wait that long to see what was inside. When the pavilions were decent or good, they still didn’t impress to the point where it would be worth it to wait 3, 4, 5, 6+ hours in a horrible queue with Chinese people constantly staring at you, cutting the line in front of you, and being in general very mean/rude. Plus remember you are standing OUTSIDE IN 105 F DEGREE HEAT THIS WHOLE TIME!!
Basically the conclusion is unless you know someone who can get you into pavilions, have a pre-set guaranteed by someone else “list” of good pavilions, or managed to get yourself on some VIP list or tour… it is completely NOT WORTH IT to even attempt to go to the Shanghai Expo. Just label it as a tourist trap in your head and move on. While some things were attention-grabbing there was not much that was so spectacular that dealing with the Expo hassle is worth it to see it. Remember – we REALLY tried to like the Expo. We spent 3 entire days there! It just wasn’t going to happen.
Once we got back to Shawn’s apartment I felt completely dead. Henk and Shawn went out to get some food to bring back (I didn’t feel too great, probably from the heat and how late it was.) and managed to get some chicken skewers (local Chinese street food) to make chicken sandwiches with and a few mini-bananas. We had to get up early the next morning to make our way to the train station and figure out how the heck we were going to get to Nanjing to meet our next Couchsurfing hosts and our new city to explore!
Francesca
It seems that Chinese people often take delight in the trouble/inconvenience of foreigners. They consistently smile and laugh when giving us bad news and not in the ‘sorry for your trouble’ way but in the ‘Ha-ha, stupid foreigner got screwed’ way. ANYWAYS, enough of my ranting! I sorted out my student ticket for the Expo for another day (I know, we were actually going to go back!) and we headed back to the apartment. Since there was no Internet (somehow it had gotten cut-off) I spent some time in an Internet Café before returning to the apartment where we ordered some mediocre Indian food and got more desperately needed sleep.
The 11th of July was supposed to be an Expo day but instead we ended up going to the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum. This was much cooler than we expected! But another example of just how many people there are in China. The place was absolutely packed when we arrived (it being a rainy Sunday afternoon) and all of the tickets for all of the shows were completely sold-out. Plus pretty much every exhibit was swarming with crowds of Chinese people in front of them. You had to wait a minute or so before you could even make your way PAST the huge crowds to even see what the exhibit was supposed to be about. Yikes. It was like returning to China’s infamous queues all over again when we walked through the Animal Kingdom hall and it was so packed that the hallway was a ‘stop and go’ walking experience. There were some pretty cool large robot insects/reptiles on display all around though and these helped to lift our spirits.
One of the more fascinating exhibits was on spiders. Of course there was a giant robot spider! There was an example ‘spider web’ that we could play with and another one we could construct ourselves, both which showed us exactly what a spider ‘feels’ in their web. We got to see what it feels like for a moth, fly, wasp, etc. is caught in their web and the differences between them. Furthermore, we learned that each of a spider’s 8 legs is on 1 branch or thread of their web at any time in order to feel these sensations.
But it was the robots section of the museum that we found so interesting. They had robots for everything! Robot ‘archers’ that could shoot arrows from their bow-and-arrow sets (and if you could make it past the Chinese, you could try and shoot one more accurate than the robot could!) and robot artists ‘drawing’ people after taking a picture of them. There were robot gobang players (a Chinese board game) who used computer-generated strategies combined with their robotic arms to ‘play’ the game with you. Even some robotic sword-fighters! There was a robot show we managed to craftily sneak into towards closing time. Twice we attempted to get into the show only to be told it was “too full” to accommodate us. So I decided that I ‘left’ my wallet in the show from last time and obviously absolutely had to go back in to get it. I mean, it’s my WALLET! Show is still going on? Fine, let me in and I’ll wait for it to finish. Sit down and watch the show? Well I guess I’ll have to… in order to wait for it to end. And of course my boyfriend has to come with me. Hehe… by the way, there were TONS of empty seats when we finally got into the show. These people are SUCH LIARS!! The little robot show had a bunch of cool dancing robots and more sword-fighting robots along with a few other things. I think we were most grateful to be able to sit down though!
The rest of the museum was quite boring, some exhibits on rocks and Shanghai’s material make-up. A bunch more interactive exhibits with lines a thousand people long. We left the museum and headed back to P&J’s where we were meeting them to head to a cool Uyghur lamb restaurant they had told us about where you could eat with your hands! (Wearing gloves of course.) Sounded like a lot of fun to us and we jumped in the taxi with them and were off. Once we got to the place the first thing they made sure to do was order a special beer called ‘Black Beer’ for us to try. While it was supposedly a pretty strong beer, it actually tasted quite alright… although if you know me, you know I’m not much of a beer drinker. And then the lamb came! It was awesome to watch P&J explain what food and sides we wanted to our waiter in Chinese. We ended up trying eggplant fries, a plate of mixed salad/veggies, bread… and some amazingly delicious dipping sauce for the lamb itself. You put on your gloves, grab a chunk of lamb from the plate, dip in the sauce, and into your mouth! YUM. We even ended up being pulled into dancing on stage with the traditional dancers they had performing at the place!
That evening Henk stayed up to watch the Spain vs. Netherlands World Cup match, while I joined him to watch the second half. It was on quite late for us 2:30 AM to 4:30 AM or so and we were supposed to go to the Expo again the next day on the 12th. Let’s just say it was a bit of a sad night for my baby (but it was a really close, difficult game!) and we needed to buy a couple of Red Bulls the next morning in order to get through the morning with little sleep and energy. This time we planned to enter on the Pudong side rather than the Puxi side, thinking we’d be able to run for those fast-passes I still thought existed for some of the country pavilions. Wrong idea! Not only were those passes impossible to get, but the Pudong side was an absolutely nightmare. We felt like cattle being corralled around the whole waiting time before entering – like literally, we had stalls we were put in. At least we picked-up a small chair (like the ones we’d seen the Chinese carrying around) for free off the street somewhere that I could use to rest my back.
The first thing we tried to do was go to the Saudi Arabia Pavilion. However, almost immediately after everyone entered the park grounds the waiting time quickly shot up to 4-5+ hours. Insane! Literally the second we got into the park that was already the wait time, and we were in line to enter at the park’s opening time around 9:00 AM. Discouraged by this and our inability to get ourselves to the front of the line, we jumped in line for the nearest pavilion – the India Pavilion – since it seemed to be going quickly. But we were wrong on that, again went much slower than we thought it would. As a personal side note, being ½ Indian, the India pavilion was a real disappointment being a 2 hour wait for literally a couple of small souvenir shops and an Indian girl dancing on a small TV. THEY DIDN’T EVEN HIRE A REAL INDIAN TO DO THE DANCING! Shameful.
We then tried to figure out a way into the Saudi Arabia Pavilion yet again, and actually ended up going into the Syria Pavilion and a guy named Mounir there (actually I saw him and he looked Saudi to me so we started cautiously stalking until he noticed and started talking to us!) who worked in the Saudi Arabian Pavilion who gave us his contact number and told us he would figure out a way to get us in without queuing. Yay! He actually suggested to us to ‘come back when there aren’t so many Chinese around and we’ll get you in’ which would be around 7:00 PM. He thought it would be good if we came not that night but one of the following nights and we agreed excitedly that not queuing would be great! Satisfied with this accomplishment, we then headed towards the Japan Pavilion for a massive 4.5 hour wait. I heard that this pavilion was “one of the better ones” so I thought it might be worth that wait. Anyways, while Henk stood in line, I ran around attempting to find another way in for us. Sadly the whole place was tightly locked down… not even the tall tale of ‘forgetting my wallet’ I had used at the museum was any help there. Not even those people working at other pavilions, who are usually granted special access, were allowed into the Japan pavilion. So we were a bit out of luck.
While Henk STILL waited (I felt bad he had to wait while I ran around) in line I saw a line for one of the smaller pavilions and realized there was ice-cream and popcorn inside. Considering the majority of Expo food was Chinese snacks… this was a blessing! I ended up going into the Vietnam, Jordan, and the Laos pavilions and eventually (I had to keep checking where Henk was in the line so I didn’t lose him!) managed to bring him back some delicious strawberry ice-cream and some popcorn and sodas for us to share. Once we finally got into the Japanese Pavilion, we were expecting something amazing. Sadly we were let down by the Expo again. Once we walked through a few random tunnels and some artistic examples of Japanese houses and their interiors, etc. But none of it was crazy interesting… then came the robots. This was the part I heard was impressive. There was a robot who gestured to us and ‘pretended’ to speak as a human’s voice played in the background; there was a robot that played the violin. But I have to say, it wasn’t impressive at all. In fact, the Science & Technology museum we went to the previous day had SO much more to see and be ‘Wow’ed’ by than the Japanese Pavilion.
Once we got into the ‘pre-show’ area, Henk and I felt like we were seeing a long camera commercial. Two actors on stage showed the audience how to ‘use’ the camera and access pictures via a ‘touch-screen’ wall and there was a little video showing what looked like sit-down Segways maneuvering people around. Wow, the future would be extremely large and lazy if that were the case! We did get to see these sit-down Segways in person after we were ushered into a new room where we sat down for an additional short show. This presentation explained that China gave Japan a pair of breeding crested ibises, an endangered species, as a gift. (Because we all know Japan is SO great with endangered species, read: whales!) In the form of traditional Asian opera, this story was played out to the audience. While this might sound intriguing the result came off as extremely cheesy, and we left feeling like we wanted our 5 hours back! Since it was getting late and we wanted to head to the European pavilions to meet fellow Couchsurfer Ugis, we grabbed the bus away from Japan.
First we had a quick stop (read: 2 hour wait) at the Switzerland Pavilion where we went inside and were disappointed to see the only worthwhile attraction (the chairlift) was broken. But think about it… it is a chairlift!! Who hasn’t been on a chairlift? Only a Chinese person who never gets the chance to go anywhere. Thus not entertaining for us Westerners at all. After quickly scarfing down two hotdogs, we met Ugis who let us into the Latvian Pavilion right away for a look around. Ugis is a Latvian who is working in China for a while who did a lot of traveling and hitch-hiking around. We contacted him through Couchsurfing originally wanting to surf with him, but since he had guests we had to find someone else to stay with. However!! Since he worked in the pavilion he offered us the favor of taking us around to a few of them and trying to get us in the next day when he didn’t have work. Yay! Anyways we got to enjoy the flying people and use the computers to try and enter a contest to ‘fly’ ourselves. Ugis brought us quickly to the Estonia Pavilion before he had to return to work. This pavilion was quite different than the others because it was filled with giant, colorful, plastic piggy-banks. You could write your idea for the environment’s protection (in your home city) on a slip of paper and put it inside the pig.
Henk was getting quite tired after this so I had him sit down for a while to rest his feet while I jumped into a few more pavilions to get some pictures and see if they were anything interesting. The first was Denmark where they had their ‘Little Mermaid’ on display, next was Brussels and the EU joint-pavilion. Here we got some free coffee biscuits! And got to see the famous Manneken Pis! But that wasn’t the best thing about the pavilion, thankfully! This one actually turned out, in our opinion, to be the BEST representation of an answer to the Expo’s question. While there were some pointless diamond stores at the end, this pavilion gave a good combination of country-overview information and examples of each countries’ efforts to improve the environment through new technology. Leaving Belgium behind, we watched some choreographed Western (modern) dancing outside which the Chinese seemed very amused by before going next door.
Serbia! Here we saw some information about Cyrillic script and more importantly another great example of an interesting pavilion. Serbia did a great job giving an informative explanation on their calendar, invented by Serbian scientist Milankovic, which they dub as: “The most precise calendar ever invented by mankind so far, and the one that deviates about 10 times less than the Gregorian [which is the one we currently use] which is only about 2 seconds a year… the Julian calendar loses a day every 128 years, the Gregorian every 3300 years, and Milankovic’s will be late one day after more than 43,000 years!” Serbians explain that their hope for the future is that the world will adapt this more accurate calendar invented by their scientists and thus be more on the same page! For example, if for the past 5000 years we had been using the Serbian calendar rather than the Gregorian calendar, we would currently only be ‘late’ by 3 hours when we are technically late now more than an entire 24 hours! The Serbians cheekily write that by using a less accurate calendar, “Today is actually tomorrow!”
Monaco was next which also quite impressed us for the pavilion’s small size. The main thing to see in the pavilion was an animated video showing the progression of Monaco from the bare rocks thousands of years ago through the 1500’s as a fortress city through present day civilization. The animation was pretty awesome and the story needed no words but was quite entertaining to watch. After the video were a few model cars and information about Monaco’s Formula One racing. It was almost 8:30 PM by the time we finished and we walked outside straight into the nightly parade going on at the Expo. It looked like a lesser, sadder version of a parade at Disneyland and was clearly aimed at any little kids running around the Expo. My God does Shanghai need a theme park or WHAT! Henk and I hit a bunch more of the pavilions after that: Iceland with its giant one-room screen video display of ice, Norway which seemed to have a good display but was illegible from their poor font choice, Ireland with a small room showing video of Irish dancing and some history of Ireland, Sweden with a giant colorful slide (which no one was allowed to go on at that time!) and strange IKEA furniture, Turkey with some interesting displays of their old historical sites and perhaps a couple others that weren’t too special. It was absolutely exhausting taking another long walk out of the Expo site, back into the crowded train, and finally back to P& J’s to crash in bed.
Another day at the Expo, another day to recover. The 13th we desperately tried to recuperate from the second long Expo day by watching the remainder of ‘My Fair Lady’ and ordered in some Papa John’s pizza and side salad for lunch. We also ended up having pizza again for dinner with P& J before we took our bags and headed out into the city. Since it was Patricia’s birthday the next day we contacted and met up with another Couchsurfer, Shawn, who decided to take us in for a couple of nights! He lived in a completely different part of town, so we’d be able to see a different side of Shanghai. We tried to take the train to Linping station but didn’t realize the trains stopped running all the way that late at night and ended up in a taxi instead. Because of all that madness we ended up being at the end station later than expected and had to call Shawn back to meet us! (Sorry about that Shawn!) We went to his place which was in an area with a lot more locals and pretty much crashed after talking to him for a while. He was a Canadian but of Chinese decent who was pretty laid-back about living in such a chaotic city around Chinese people. We learned from him that if you don’t force yourself to ‘go with the flow,’ you’ll be constantly uncomfortable and frustrated in China. Still not easy for your average Westerner, used to a minimal level of comfort, personal space, hygiene, and a little friendliness from other people!
The next morning we were off to the Expo again! (I know, you are thinking, WHY would they go for 3 entire days!!) We were pretty tired of the Expo, its heat, the long lines and rude Chinese people… but Ugis promised he’d meet up with us that day and help relieve us of some waiting lines and we were banking on that making the situation much more manageable. We took the train to South Xizang and bought some raisin buns on the way. This time we started at Puxi again after buying our tickets and started on the corporate side with the Coca-Cola Pavilion. Before we could get anywhere the line was already 4+ hours long! Remember, we aren’t coming into the park late. We are there when the doors open!! Henk stood in line while I ended up having a little adventure of my own… (Sadly without him, someone had to hold down the fort after all!)
Henk sent me over to the Space-Home Pavilion thinking if the line was a lot shorter than the Coca-Cola one, I could call him over and we would go straight into that one instead of waiting in the 4+ hour line. However, it wasn’t. It was like a 5+ hour wait. And everything around it was EVEN LONGER. We are talking 6+ hour lines at the beginning of the day at the Expo. ALREADY. Insanity! I wanted to see the inside and decide for myself if the pavilion was really worth that long of a line, and I didn’t want to have Henk and I stand in line for something for 5+ hours if it wasn’t worth it. I decided to try my sneaky technique again of having ‘forgotten my wallet’ inside the pavilion. Interesting, either due to their misunderstanding of English or my own awesome skills (let’s say skills) they ended up asking if I had forgotten my pass, but wanted to see their pavilion. I agreed that sure, I did, believing they meant wallet.
Quickly I realized they thought I was a pavilion employee as well who had simply forgotten her employee pass to get inside! I went with it and decided that Ugis was a close-enough new friend of mine that I could say I was from the Latvian Pavilion but didn’t have my pass… and they brought me through the employee/VIP entrance and I got to see the pavilion! Which was complete and utter crap. In fact, there was practically nothing in there and no English captions whatsoever. I think I would have kamikaze’d myself if a 5 hour wait in line had proceeded that disaster. Not willing to let my new employee status go to waste, I convinced one of the guys in charge at the Space-Home Pavilion that I was indeed an employee who not only forgot her pass, but was very bad with directions and would need a personal employee-escort to another pavilion nearby… quickly, while I was still on my break.
And I actually ended up with one! He assigned someone to take me on the bus over to one of the Theme Pavilions. Unfortunately, it somehow got lost in translation (which is a mystery to me how that happened, since they both speak Chinese!) between her and her boss that I was an employee who didn’t have my pass. She thought I’d simply been someone who needed help finding a pavilion. SO, I went to an emergency plan B. When she brought me up to the employees working at the Theme pavilion, I tried to explain to them that I had forgotten my employee pass and wanted to see the pavilion. THIS time they mistake me saying ‘pass’ for meaning ‘wallet!’ WOW! Convinced I had left my wallet inside, these guys let me in through the VIP entrance as well and I got to see another pavilion. This pavilion however, was ALSO complete junk! It was like a Chinese/Western museum storehouse but with replicas rather than the real things. Plus it was huge and little message managed to make it through the display’s madness. Once I was done with all this… well, remembering that amazing guy I’m dating? Yeah he was still standing this entire time (the past 2 ½ hours!!) in the line for the Coca-Cola Pavilion. Ack! I felt SO bad… and went running back to rejoin him as fast as I could. He was amused by my story and admitted he was wondering why I had been gone for so long. Thank God both of the pavilions were horrible so there was nothing he missed out on.
We still had another couple hours to wait for the Coca-Cola Pavilion and kept ourselves amused by taking pictures of/with some of the little Chinese kids gathering around us in line. FINALLY we made it inside the pavilion to watch an interesting little animated video on the ‘inside’ of your average Coca-Cola vending machine aka in ‘The Happiness Factory.’ There were these cartoon characters who explained just how a bottle of Coke goes from their vending machine to your hands! And this involves using a large flying pig called a ‘Chin-Oink’ (helicopter) to deliver the soda. After the video we were brought into a room where we were given mini Coca-Cola bottles and told a specific method to open them. Twist the cap off slightly, then tighten it, then turn the bottle upside down and back around before finally opening the bottle. Somehow all this effort is supposed to ‘activate’ the bottle, making the soda become naturally colder instantly. Henk and I tried this effort first with his bottle that was already somewhat cold then later in the day with my bottle once it had become luke-warm. Neither time did we notice too much of a difference though!
Next we popped into the China Railway Pavilion where we found a ticket machine for buying train tickets. Since we were supposed to leave for Nanjing the next morning we tried to buy some tickets but ended up getting a bit confused about which railway station we’d have to leave from. Instead we went to find a bathroom (don’t even get me started on Shanghai Expo bathrooms!) We also went into the xyz Pavilion which didn’t really stand out to us. By this time (around 3:00 PM) we went to go meet up with Ugis back on the country-side (Pudong) outside of his Latvia Pavilion. He was luckily off for the rest of the day and offered to spend the next few hours helping us get into pavilions! So awesome of him.
We went to the Spain Pavilion first which had flamenco dancing, interesting video and 4-D effects, and a giant, creepy baby at the end! One of the better pavilions, we were glad to have seen it. Next we headed to the Germany Pavilion which had a LOT of information (too much to actually stop and read) and a show at the end where the crowd yelled and ‘made’ a giant ball move around with their voices. Not too interesting, and the show was aimed towards a much younger crowd. We then hit the UK Pavilion which looked strange from the outside and once we got closer we realized why. It was called the ‘Seed Pavilion’ and each of the 60,000 long acrylic rods had a small seed at the end of it. I think the entire pavilion was supposed to represent a seed as well. Regardless… that was IT. Yeah, pretty boring and not worth a gazillion hour wait for sure. Sure didn’t say anything about future tech for the environment. The ground was so slick and slippery (it had started raining) that I slipped and fell at this pavilion. One thing about China is it rains A LOT and you need to have really good shoes because the Chinese government consistently builds things using this really smooth material that becomes a pure waterslide when it gets wet. I really don’t know which ‘genius’ designed this one but it makes any smooth track become impossible to walk on without ‘skating’ over the layer of water that builds up on it.
The Italian Pavilion was next and as I stated before it was basically a strange fashion/art gallery with clothing and musical instruments on the walls and a giant statue of a high-heel in the middle of the floor. Hardly anything had ANYTHING to do with science. There were one or two tech-based inventions but again nothing very innovative. After Italy we headed to the MeteoWorld Pavilion, one of the supposedly-interesting tech pavilions which turned out to be a complete flop. There was a 4-D film about the weather that was neither entertaining nor fascinating. We decided to go for the Singapore and Thailand Pavilions next, making our way closer to the exit. Singapore had some food displayed on video monitors and a garden on the top level but surely wouldn’t have both worth any wait. Thailand was actually much more exciting. We saw a video once we entered and then moved into a room with a giant robotic temple guardian statue. Next we saw a 4-D video that was much more action-packed than anything else we had seen up to that point. But then again this could be a misguided view from us since most of the rest had been just so bad!
The rest of the time we didn’t end up getting into any more pavilions. It seems that the rules on the ‘other’ side of the Expo center were much more enforced (only those with passes themselves are supposed to get through, not their ‘friends’) and the UAE Pavilion, South Korea Pavilion, and Taiwan Pavilion all rejected us. We did eventually meet up with our buddy Mounir from the Saudi Arabian Pavilion who actually said it really would be no problem to get us in, but not on that night either! Apparently some Prince from Saudi Arabia was coming to see the Expo Pavilion and everyone was a bit on edge as a result. At least he exchanged contact info with Ugis and Ugis would be able to get in himself at some point. To try and make-up for rejecting us entry, Mounir and his friend gave us little token Saudi Arabia pins as souvenirs. It was sad that we couldn’t see the pavilion that night, but it was nice of them to try and we were glad to ‘return’ the favor to Ugis by putting him in contact with someone to get him in! (Expo workers are also not ‘allowed’ to jump the line at the Saudi Pavilion either.)
By this time Henk and I were pretty much done with the Expo. While Ugis had to run and we still had a little Expo time we could take advantage of, we decided that we had seen almost all of the so-called “great” Expo pavilions and had for the most part not been very impressed. When the pavilions were bad, they were completely horrible wastes of time and even offensive to the sensibilities for making you wait that long to see what was inside. When the pavilions were decent or good, they still didn’t impress to the point where it would be worth it to wait 3, 4, 5, 6+ hours in a horrible queue with Chinese people constantly staring at you, cutting the line in front of you, and being in general very mean/rude. Plus remember you are standing OUTSIDE IN 105 F DEGREE HEAT THIS WHOLE TIME!!
Basically the conclusion is unless you know someone who can get you into pavilions, have a pre-set guaranteed by someone else “list” of good pavilions, or managed to get yourself on some VIP list or tour… it is completely NOT WORTH IT to even attempt to go to the Shanghai Expo. Just label it as a tourist trap in your head and move on. While some things were attention-grabbing there was not much that was so spectacular that dealing with the Expo hassle is worth it to see it. Remember – we REALLY tried to like the Expo. We spent 3 entire days there! It just wasn’t going to happen.
Once we got back to Shawn’s apartment I felt completely dead. Henk and Shawn went out to get some food to bring back (I didn’t feel too great, probably from the heat and how late it was.) and managed to get some chicken skewers (local Chinese street food) to make chicken sandwiches with and a few mini-bananas. We had to get up early the next morning to make our way to the train station and figure out how the heck we were going to get to Nanjing to meet our next Couchsurfing hosts and our new city to explore!
Francesca
