minamimusings

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. :) ---- 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. (Ho...

I was fortunate enough to catch the World Expo in Shanghai with a friend of mine last September. And, thanks to her cousins who gave us their incompletely used 7-day tickets, my first day's entrance was practically free! So, what were our realizations when we arrived at the World Expo? One, it was huge. No, it was HUGE. Each pavilion was almost the same size in area of the Folk Arts Theater. Some were as big as Mall of Asia. Considering how many countries participated, adding in the number of walkways and food buildings and washrooms, plus the roads... and I will not be assuming if I say that those maps of China weren't exaggerating. China is BIG. Whoever's on the opposite end of it in the world better watch out when all those people start jumping up and down together. In relation, we also found out how many Chinese actually exist. We visited the Expo for TWO DAYS. And I could count the number of foreigners (which, for my purposes, I shall define as non-Chinese-looking...