I'm sorry, did you say five HUNDRED THOUSAND?!? And that's LESS than you were expecting?

Hi all! I have excellent news. I'm in Kunming, and I started my program last monday. After much difficulty and a lot of hoop-jumping (which included moving all of the students from the 9th to the 14th floor of the building we're staying in so we could be in rooms with ethernet connections), I finally have an internet connection! It seems to work roughly 20% of the time, which is a good 19% more than the internet we had before. Below is the description of my experience at the World Expo in Shanghai, which was a while ago now. I'm working on writing up all the exciting things I've done since then, so you should have more stories to look forward to! I hope you're enjoying the blog; I welcome any suggestions you have! You should also become a follower (to the left) so it looks like I have friends.


On Sunday, 5/31, I went to the Shanghai 2010 World Expo. It opened at 9am, we got there at 7, and the lines looked like this:




Note that this is one of 5 gates at this entrance, and there are 9 separate entrances. There were over 500,000 (yes, half a million!) people at the expo the day before I went (not sure how many on my day) and China's been pretty disappointed with the lack of attendance. I, on the other hand, was dismayed at the number of people - lines to get into the more popular pavilions (the individual country buildings) were absurd; for example, this is the Saudi Arabia Pavilion, with a four-hour queue built up less than ten minutes after opening:



The Germany, Switzerland, Canada, USA, and many other pavilions were like this - by my calculation, if you waited in those lines you could see at most three pavilions in a day! Not my idea of fun, so I skipped lines longer than about 15 minutes. Therefore, I can't tell you firsthand what was inside this pavilion, but the expo volunteer I was walking around with (conveniently the son of my hosts) said it was usually movies about the past, present, and future of the country, along with a medium-size museum about the country and some pretty impressive experimental/futuristic technologies.

The whole thing reminded me of a glorified version of Thurtene Carnival (for those of you who don't know, a student-run carnival at Wash U in which a bunch of student groups, especially Greek organizations, spend months building enormous (and awesome) buildings for a weekend carnival, then tear them down). Countries had poured millions/billions of dollars into building massive structures (many of which, to be fair, were beautiful architectural marvels) that will be seen by tourists for the next 6 months, and then torn down. The countries aren't making a profit (except, perhaps, China) and they won't have much tangible to show for it afterwords. That said, the entire thing was remarkable in many ways. Here's a little more about what we did and some more pictures:

As soon as we got inside, we were greeted by the impressive China Pavilion:



... and hundreds (maybe thousands) of Chinese tourists running towards various pavilions to try to beat the lines. Jake (the volunteer I was with), Dong Li (his mom) and I walked leisurely around, looked at most of the pavilions from the outside, and went inside a few that had short lines, such as the Nepal Pavilion:



Which had a lot of unbelievable wood carving:



And some pretty sweet gold buddhas:




The craziest pavilion we saw, in my opinion, was the UK pavilion - which, unfortunately, we didn't have time to go inside. The outside is just a bunch of outward-pointing needles, and doesn't look like a building at all!



Another cool one we went inside was Chile, which had a bunch of cool futuristic designs made of imported Chilean wood (that smelled really good) and a LOT of wine displays:



Many countries elected to choose a distinguishing feature to emphasize about their country. For Chile, it was wine; for Brasil, it was soccer:


You probably can't tell from the picture, but the screen on the left with the soccer players was actually really cool - it had a number you could call from your cell phone, and then you could use the key pad to control the players! Gave the people in line something to do.

And here's a shot of Jake and I in front of the Canada pavilion, which apparently had a Cirque du Soleil show inside!




I have lots more pictures but don't want to bore you, so I'll leave you with an image of the China Pavilion at night! Walking around at night was a totally different experience, because all the pavilions and landscape features that China installed light up beautifully, and the crowds thin out (if only a little). Feel free to ask me for more pictures if you want!