First views from an exhibition

[fivemack]

Shanghai starts out much less alien than Xi'an, or even Beijing: there are buildings not of brutalist concrete, the streets are no more than three lanes in each direction and, a greater miracle, the traffic drives in only three lanes along them. There's a very competent metro: thirteen lines as I type.

And so I took this metro to the Expo.

Imagine a county show or state fair, but exhibiting a country and featuring pavilions from a planet. The fairground is about 3000 acres in the city centre, including three ferry ports, two very substantial bridges across the Huangpe, and many kilometres of multi-lane highway. And this space is dotted with a couple of hundred pavilions; one of the midsized pavilions is a repurposed dry dock of the China State Shipbuilding Company, and there are a dozen or so that size and several much larger.

I've walked round the site for nine hours today and might have seen 10% of it. The Vietnamese pavilion, a temple framed inside and out in bamboo, is probably the best bit of architecture; the exhibition of carpets in the Iranian pavilion the most brain-bending - they had some utterly sublime velvet carpets from Qom, but also a couple of renditions, carefully done, priced at a couple of thousand pounds and labelled as the result of a year's labour, which depicted two badly-drawn ugly kittens playing with balls of poorly-rendered string. I can only hope that these are the work of CNC looms sold as handicraft.

I've got two more day tickets to the Expo: will need to turn up early one morning to get one of the closely-rationed tickets to the China pavilion, though if that fails there is a secondary market - this is China, of course there's a secondary market - and they'll be thirty quid from a tout. Tomorrow I will recharge by looking at non-Expo parts of Shanghai, and trying to buy a 16G memory card for my camera and a couple of nice wall-scrolls for my living room.

Supper was at Old Uncle's Fast Food, which regrettably doesn't seem to have made it outside China: regrettably for two reasons. First, any fast-food place where all orders come by default with a bowl of steamed broccoli should definitely be encouraged, and secondly because they make perfect, glistening, wobbly creme caramel. OK, it's chicken flavoured and served as a starter, but such things can be fixed to Western appetites.

Comments

[angharad (from livejournal.com)]

That sounds rather cool, though not totally convinced by meat creme caramel yet...

Check out the Bund Tourist Tunnel under the river, it is most bizarre. TFM compared the mode of transport to the computer game Deus Ex. Of course the metro is cheaper and more sensible but there are no inflatable clowns accompanied by booming voices saying 'magma'.

--
Angharadxxx

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I had been on it that morning, and it was indeed madder than two newts stuck together

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

Don't know how long you are in Shanghai for but there a some nice day trips that you can do from there - Suzhou and Hangzhou/Xi Hu are both less than an hour by train I seem to remember. There are also various 'water villages' built around canals (like Venice), though I think you need to get buses to those.

The top of the Jin Mao tower is worth going to one evening too.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I did get to the top of the Jin Mao, and have an extremely expensive beer. I was in Shanghai five and a half days and spent three of them at Expo, so no chance to venture out of the city, but Suzhou and Hangzhou certainly look good for next time. I'm reasonably sure there will be a next time.