When we arrived we followed the crowd, the best thing to do in this type of situation. And boy was the crowd flowing. We got to the ticket booths and asked what tickets were available. We chose a day pass and then walked over to the security check point. The security check point was a made house. It was kind of organized but had a lot of people. Instead of standing in a line, with maybe two people wide it was a line of fifteen people wide. We were shoved through the metal barriers like cattle. It was not a pleasant experience and it was Latanya's worst nightmare. But luckily we made it through alive and well.
The next stop was getting on a special subway line that lead to the Expo. This was once again another shove match. So many people not enough space. After the cramped quarters and a rather short ride, only two stops, we finally arrived. Yeah!!!
We got there the weather was overcast but we knew it would start raining soon. The weather was completely different than the day before. Yesterday it was really warm with hardly a cloud in the sky. Today it was about to pour and it was chilly.
We had our map of the Expo and headed toward the USA exhibit. The grounds were huge. It made Disneyland look tiny. As we walked we saw many different countires. Every country had it's own exhibit. Many were made up of large buildings that were specially designed to represent themselves. Small countries were put into large warehouse buildings together. For example the many of the Caribbean countries were put together, and many South American and Latin American countries were put together and so on. The larger ones had huge buildings to themselves and put on a wonderful display. The lines were extremely long for the popular countries. If you think about it, most of the tourists there were Chinese. Many of them would never go to these countries. They had souvenir passports were you could get a stamp from the different exhibits.
We arrived at the USA exhibit and the line was extremely long. We did not wait too long though, about an hour. When we went inside they filled a large room with about 300 people. There were large screens that showed a short film and introduction to the exhibit. We were then moved to an adjacent room with benches and watched another film about the future of the USA in respect to innovative thinking in relationship with our youth. It was cute. We were then moved to another room for another film and then one more after that. The concept was future planning and making a better community. While doing this help mold our children to help brainstorm and eventually help lead the cause. It was a great concept but a little bit of a let down as far as entertaining. The last room at the end was filled with merchandise of course with all of the corporate sponsors. Very American. It was great to see home even for a little bit.
Next we began to head to other exhibits. The short list of countries we saw were, Cuba, North Korea, Cambodia, Caribbean Nations and the African Nations. We could have spent several days there and checked out them all but that was not going to happen. The place was too big. We spent most of our time just walking around. It took forever to walk from one end of the grounds to the other. We did see a lot of golf carts that drove around like buses on a bus route. We opted out of this because we wanted to stop as we pleased when we saw an interesting area.
The highlight for Latanya was of course the Guyana booth. She felt proud of her heritage. She was also very interested in the displays. She took me on a tour and taught me a lot. She felt closer to home when we saw the booth.
After several hours of walking and by now the rain was really coming down and our feet were really hurting, we decided to leave and head to the downtown financial center. We got to the ultra modern high rises and the rain had subsided. We walked around a mall for awhile and then found a delicious restaurant. We stuffed ourselves with fried rice, dumplings and wantons, mmm.
After dinner we walked along the river bank. We stopped at a Paulaner brew house. Apparently they have a lot of them in Shanghai. It was nice to have a good beer on draft, something hard to find in Korea,unless you want to travel a long ways. After our happy hour beer we headed back to the hostel to get a happy hour beer at our hostel bar. All in all it was a full day. We did lots on foot. The next day we had no more sights on our list in Shanghai, so it was really all up in the air. One important event on our schedule was to catch a train tomorrow evening, an overnight train to Xi'an.
For more pics here is the link just highlight the web address and put into your web browser Enjoy!:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=75203&id=1654712300&l=fa8a9b3006
1 comment:
Love the Guyana booth.
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