9/25

9/25 9:30am CST

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkBKimV06KE

After a breakfast that my gut pains do not welcome, we hit the pavement for the second day of our lightning visit to Shanghai. Today it's another tourist area called Xinghuang Temple in the morning. More shops hawking their wares. My parents manage to buy a couple of things as souvenirs. One place smelled so incredibly weird. This fry shop was selling various fried meats on a stick, and I guess the meat plus spices plus cracked oil made for a very acrid smell. It bothered me but it nearly made my dad hurl it was so strong. We hit noon and got over to the restaurant where Bao Gongjing invited us for lunch. She brought her husband this time. We had a very pleasant chat about various things, over a quite good meal. I think this was the second best meal we had in China, next to that place in Beijing. Again, refinement really makes a difference. I had problems following parts of the conversation because her husband's accent was really unfamiliar to me.

After lunch, we made it official -- we were full on tourists tackling the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. This is a thing that's been the cause of all the buzz in Shanghai for the past 5 months. Over Mid-Autumn Festival, traffic through the expo peaked at 630,000 on the day before we arrived. In all, some 300 million have attended. I think I did argue that it would be weird to go to Shanghai while the expo was running and not even check it out. Bao Gongjing handed us 3 tickets and would not hear of our paying for them. So of course we would go.

The Expo is many things. It's a way for China to show off one of its premier cities, and it's a way for countries to show off who they are to Chinese visitors. The Expo organization and infrastructure is outstanding. Everything was clearly well planned and executed. The expo area is virtually spotless and really attractive. All across the city, volunteer stands are stationed to help tourists get to where they want to go. The Shanghai people, according to our lunch chat, are generally pleasant and have really gotten behind the expo. Of course it's delivering gobs of money to the city, but even so, it must be hard to tolerate the tourists. Many have to adjust commute schedules to deal with the loads of people clogging the subway and the streets, to give you an idea. I'm sure everyone's had to point to the same obvious landmarks over and over for the past months. But still, most of the volunteers and extra city staff (cleaners, traffic guards, police) were exceedingly cheerful about helping out. Compare this to the atmosphere in Beijing for the Olympics. Beijing people can be compared to New Yorkers -- rather grumpy about it all. The prevailing attitude during the games was "let's get this over with and all yous people leave." So in comparison, touring around Shanghai has been an absolute pleasure.

The Expo pavilions themselves are interesting. I suppose each country gets to decide how to design the exterior of the building and how to populate the innards with an introduction to the country. All the big countries had immense lines to go into the pavilions, so we agreed not to try any of those. Instead, we sampled such obscure gems as the Czech Republic, Armenia, Hungary, and Norway. Heck, even Norway had a 20 minute line. Norway's was very well made, and the Czech one was very bizarre and intriguing, but overall it didn't feel worth it to try to go into a big country's pavilion, based on the contents of what we saw. It was nice enough to see that each country was executing their ideas differently and to their own standards. Oh, we saw these guys sneaking into the exit of Hungary, so my dad tried that with Montenegro, but some Montenegran caught him and shooed him out in Chinese. The Expo had this clever idea of selling you a toy passport for fairly cheap. When you get into a pavilion, some clerks can stamp your passport for that country. The goal of course being to get a full passport. We actually saw a guy selling fully stamped passports, and people fliping through them to confirm. I can't imagine anyone really wanting that. But yeah, I suppose if we'd bought those passports, we'd be banned from Montenegro for life. We swung by the US pavilion to see if they had special treatment for citizens. We got this idea from the UK urchin pavilion, which gave priority access to UK passport holders. The guard told us that, with the US passport being such a common thing in Shanghai, that they couldn't do it. The US Diner sold such awesome food items as hot dogs, hamburgers, pizza, and pulled pork. They, sadly, did not have a Philly cheeseteak or Boston creme pie or gumbo or fried chicken. Come on!

We got to ride the ferry across the Huangpu River to the other half of the Expo, which had technology and theme exhibits. The lines were also very long here, so we gave up and went to dinner. The Expo actually hired its own fleet of VW Touran taxis, which are much nicer than the normal taxi fleets. Only these guys are allowed to deliver people out of the Expo. I suppose when the Expo ends in October, they'll join the normal fleets.

For dinner, we hit up a roast duck joint. It claims to have roast duck as good as Beijing's best places. After back to back testing, I can safely say that Beijing has nothing to worry about. The basting flavor was good, as was the quality of the local duck. But this place was nowhere close in terms of rendering out the fat and getting the skin to a crisp perfection. Add on top of that the godawful service (truly worse than the place to which it aspires, Quanjude) and you have an experience that is passable but not worth repeating.