Shanghai

My first summer vacation in years

It all began when I realized that I had two months of no school and no work for the first time since I was 16 years old. It was time for a summer vacation in Asia.

Around 10 AM on June 30th I made my way to Beijing South Train Station with Dirk and Cooper to take the bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai. The bullet train still required an 11 hour time commitment but allowed us to see the polluted and impoverished countryside; it was also a warm up for our two day train ride that we’d be taking in a week to Tibet. We learned a valuable lesson on this train ride bring food and plenty of it. I made a few trips to the dining car and only to find that the choices never changed from random array of unrecognizable and non-huffed food products, needless to say after an 11 hour train ride with nothing to eat the shinning lights of Shanghai were a welcome sight.

Shanghai is a big city (by some estimates the biggest in the world) not unlike many of China’s cities but the big difference between those cities is that Shanghai fell under the influence of the British and French which creates a city that doesn’t look like the concrete jungles of Xian and Beijing.

2010 is the year of the Shanghai Expo (The World’s Fair) and a major part of the reason for the visit to Shanghai was to experience a World’s Fair. We had decided we’d set aside 3 days to see the Expo but we almost immediately began to rethink that decision. As soon as I stepped outside to head to the Expo I was hit in the face by 95+ degree heat with humidity to match and it was only 9 in the morning.

By about 10 AM Cooper, Dirk, Aamna (a girl in our program who was interning in Shanghai), me and 400,000 other people were filing through the gates to see what the fair had to offer. The weather and the crowds slowed down our excitement to explore the largest world’s fair ever. Over the course of the day we visited around 10 pavilions many of them smaller countries due to the extremely long line. We also decided not to wait in the long lines due to the quality of the displays often times little more than advertisements for some of the host countries larger domestic companies and a number of displays from the board of tourism. I had planned to spend 3 days at the fair but after 1 day I had seen enough and so had everyone else. We decided we’d spend the rest of our time in Shanghai catching up with friends, relaxing and seeing the remaining sights along the famous Bund area before heading off to Tibet.