The Shanghai Diaries circa World Expo 2010
Sooooo, I have been on a few trips back to our favorite Land of the Rising Sun since my last entry here, but I haven't had time (or effort) to organize my thoughts and photos. Meh. In the meantime, I want to share some posts from when I went to the World Expo back in 2010. I didn't have a lot of access to the internet back then, so they were hosted by my now-deleted LJ. :)
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The Shanghai Diary #1, also known as, "I can’t tweet, so help me God!"
I woke up in this room that’s strangely reminiscent of the room I stayed in in Tokyo with Paul, but this one has no windows, the carpet is really dingy, and I’m crossing my fingers really hard there are no bedbugs.
Surprisingly, I am online! We found the ethernet cable and, consequently, the internet. (YEY!) However, I don’t know what I was expecting knowing that most of the sites I frequent and use as my sounding boards–facebook, twitter–are blocked. Livejournal, obviously, surprisingly, isn’t. So is Gmail. (Hooray!) Thank God for small blessings. The Chinese still believe in unlimited email accounts.
I woke up in this room that’s strangely reminiscent of the room I stayed in in Tokyo with Paul, but this one has no windows, the carpet is really dingy, and I’m crossing my fingers really hard there are no bedbugs.
Surprisingly, I am online! We found the ethernet cable and, consequently, the internet. (YEY!) However, I don’t know what I was expecting knowing that most of the sites I frequent and use as my sounding boards–facebook, twitter–are blocked. Livejournal, obviously, surprisingly, isn’t. So is Gmail. (Hooray!) Thank God for small blessings. The Chinese still believe in unlimited email accounts.
I’m going to have to vent on LJ for the next few days, since it’s the only one available to me. If it suddenly gets blocked, I’ll try using my vox or multiply, but I hope I don’t have to.
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Travel last night was really convenient. The roads here are...
A COCKROACH!
... Sorry... got distracted. Thankfully it was only a small one. Dead now.
As I was saying, the roads are really wide and paved. SO MANY FLYOVERS. It was like look- ing at a real life version of the Philippines in 2000 in a Pugad Baboy comic. One of the things I remember thinking was that they had SO MUCH LAND. Well, duh, Sheila, you’re in freaking CHINA. More later. Gotta shower and start our day.
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"My knowledge of the language is really thin. I’m worried if I start speaking a single word of Chinese, the person I’m talking to will start going off on a tangent and I’ll reply with a pathetic & charming ’Huh?’"
"I think I know how it feels like to be at the Tower of Babel. God, you are weird. Yeah, you know exactly why I think this."
"Ohmygod. It’s the squat-down toilet seat. No Thank You. I’ll die of UTI first."
"NORMAL TOILETS! Clean and with auto-flushing! And no lines! THANK YOU LORD! (And yet, I raise my eyebrows at your sense of humor, God. Why’d you have to make me threaten myself first???)"
"Why is there a fly in our windowless hotel room?"
"You understand I ask that because I wonder how it came in and where it came from."
"The Turkish guy manning the ice cream stand was freaky and snappish. Too bad. I think my mom would have liked him. Damn them and their straight noses."
----
–
Travel last night was really convenient. The roads here are...
A COCKROACH!
... Sorry... got distracted. Thankfully it was only a small one. Dead now.
As I was saying, the roads are really wide and paved. SO MANY FLYOVERS. It was like look- ing at a real life version of the Philippines in 2000 in a Pugad Baboy comic. One of the things I remember thinking was that they had SO MUCH LAND. Well, duh, Sheila, you’re in freaking CHINA. More later. Gotta shower and start our day.
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The Shanghai Diary #2, otherwise known as, "If I could tweet, they would be as follows:"
"It’s 9AM on a Thursday and my feet are screaming. I shouldn’t be surprised. They were so loud last night they almost lost their voices."
"I don’t think I like it here. I don’t like the people. They are rude. I miss Tokyo and its polite & disciplined Japanese."
"Great, my camera ran out of battery by 6PM."
"Ohmygod, Manong! Personal space! Personal space! PERSONAL SPACE!"
"Why do these other countries’ pavilions have a "sister to China" theme? I thought this was a World Expo & you’re supposed to promote yourself."
"And while we’re on that note, why doesn’t anyone speak English? I have not encountered a person who understood us the entire day."
"It’s 9AM on a Thursday and my feet are screaming. I shouldn’t be surprised. They were so loud last night they almost lost their voices."
"I don’t think I like it here. I don’t like the people. They are rude. I miss Tokyo and its polite & disciplined Japanese."
"Great, my camera ran out of battery by 6PM."
"Ohmygod, Manong! Personal space! Personal space! PERSONAL SPACE!"
"Why do these other countries’ pavilions have a "sister to China" theme? I thought this was a World Expo & you’re supposed to promote yourself."
"And while we’re on that note, why doesn’t anyone speak English? I have not encountered a person who understood us the entire day."
"My knowledge of the language is really thin. I’m worried if I start speaking a single word of Chinese, the person I’m talking to will start going off on a tangent and I’ll reply with a pathetic & charming ’Huh?’"
"I think I know how it feels like to be at the Tower of Babel. God, you are weird. Yeah, you know exactly why I think this."
"Ohmygod. It’s the squat-down toilet seat. No Thank You. I’ll die of UTI first."
"NORMAL TOILETS! Clean and with auto-flushing! And no lines! THANK YOU LORD! (And yet, I raise my eyebrows at your sense of humor, God. Why’d you have to make me threaten myself first???)"
"Why is there a fly in our windowless hotel room?"
"You understand I ask that because I wonder how it came in and where it came from."
"The Turkish guy manning the ice cream stand was freaky and snappish. Too bad. I think my mom would have liked him. Damn them and their straight noses."
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The Shanghai Diary #3, or "We went to London to visit the Queen’s seeds."
I think you can surmise from the way I described my lower appendages in the previous post, that we’d naturally have trouble waking up and getting ready the day after. This morning found us late to rise (compounded by the fact that our room does not have windows, so if you don’t have a watch, you wouldn’t know what time of day it is.) But, aching feet or no, we HAD to try to visit the expo again. And so we did.
Our strategy for today had been to avoid the zones where all the country pavilions were, and instead focus our morning, actually afternoon, in what we thought of as the not-so-popular areas. Unfortunately, we underestimated the popularity of Japan... which stretches even to its industrial pavilion. No matter, we were able to hang out nearby and have a really heavy lunch of Kukuru Takoyaki, pansit and gyudon to make up for our measly dinner from the night before. We did explore the shops outside, but due to the masses in line–the wait to get in was about 3 hours...egads–we reverted to our previous days’ strategy: look for a pavilion with little to no or, at the very least, moving, line and explore that instead.
I think you can surmise from the way I described my lower appendages in the previous post, that we’d naturally have trouble waking up and getting ready the day after. This morning found us late to rise (compounded by the fact that our room does not have windows, so if you don’t have a watch, you wouldn’t know what time of day it is.) But, aching feet or no, we HAD to try to visit the expo again. And so we did.
Our strategy for today had been to avoid the zones where all the country pavilions were, and instead focus our morning, actually afternoon, in what we thought of as the not-so-popular areas. Unfortunately, we underestimated the popularity of Japan... which stretches even to its industrial pavilion. No matter, we were able to hang out nearby and have a really heavy lunch of Kukuru Takoyaki, pansit and gyudon to make up for our measly dinner from the night before. We did explore the shops outside, but due to the masses in line–the wait to get in was about 3 hours...egads–we reverted to our previous days’ strategy: look for a pavilion with little to no or, at the very least, moving, line and explore that instead.
The Urban Footprint pavilion next door, and the Korea Business Industrial a few meters away, though packed with people inside, didn’t having long waiting times. We were hoping to get inside Coca Cola, but we knew even without looking, how much of a disappointment that would be, crowdwise, so we opted to go to the Case Pavilions zone.
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