Pictures linked at the bottom.
So today I went to the world expo today. The university arranged a field trip there for the international students there and provided a bus for us. It came a bit after 8am and we got into the expo around 10am maybe. It wasn’t too hot today compared to the last few days but still pretty hot for walking around. I have no idea how they found all this space for the expo but its huge. Its on both sides of the Huangpu River in Puxi and Pudong.
We only went to a few of the pavilions. A lot of them had some huuuge lines with 6 hour waits. None of us really wanted to wait in those in this heat. They told us that some of the countries were letting their citizens cut go in earlier if we showed them a passport so we went to the USA pavilion. The guys told us they weren’t doing but then asked us what states we were from. Since three of the us were from states that apparently helped sponsored the pavilion (Tennessee, Texas and I think Colorado) they let us cut in, skipping like a good 100 people.
Can’t say the US pavilion was all too impressive. There were three rooms. In the first one this guy did an introduction in Chinese that I couldn’t really understand too well (the English translation didn’t seem nearly as long as the Chinese speech so eh). Then there was an introductory video where they started with showing a bunch of people in the states trying to say welcome and hello in Mandarin. It was pretty funny I got to admit because the people were like “Hu– you want me to say what?”.
The next room was another video where it seems like what they mostly talked about what how caring children are and something about that. Obama got some good face time and there was a lot of children in it. The next room was cooler but still pretty corny. It was a short about this girl in a dingy neighborhood with a “vision” for a garden on this patch of dirty ground in the corner in front of her window. She starts by trying to plant one flower but it gets trampled, then tries again with the same result. Then an Asian lady comes and plants a flower too. Then another neighbor. Then she goes around showing people the picture of the dream garden she drew to get more help and at the end the dingy neighborhood is all colorful and pretty and everyone is happy. The whole setting of the place was cool but the whole thing was pretty corny lol.
We saw Chile’s pavilion as well since the line was moving pretty fast. They had a pretty good pavilion. It was really big and they actually showed stuff about their country. I really liked this one spot where they had an upside down room on the ceiling and then this area that was like a balcony only it was dark and the floor, sides, and ceiling outside the “balcony” were all mirrors so they reflected the view that was facing in front of you – which was a display of windows as you would see on a side of a building. So when you looked around it looked like a building that stretched all the way up, down, left and right.
There were a few “walk through” pavilions that don’t really have a line. You just go in and its divided up into sections for different parts of the country or for restaurants and stuff. These were like Africa and the Caribbean. We went to the Philippine’s one as well but it was a pretty big disappointment. It was pretty much just a room that sold a bunch of stuff. They had one corner with some posters about their country but that was it.
We ended up just walking around and looking at the outsides of the buildings instead of waiting in lines. Our teacher (the one in charge of our daily living) went to Spain’s pavilion and she must be super determined because I think she was in line almost the entire time we were looking at other stuff. I don’t know how people can do that in this heat. Though most line areas are shaded and some of the countries had misters and fans on there (US’s did).
It was pretty amusing to see everyone had those little fold up chairs, though I’m not surprised. I know if it were my parents, they would have one for everyone. There were also people sleeping on benches and stuff. The others were pretty amused by that but I’m not surprised by that either lol.
Well anyways, I’ve uploaded the pictures from the Jade Buddah Temple, the acrobat show and the World Expo:
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