Yesterday we (Mason, Landon and I) visited Expo 2010. The Expo is the world's fair that is held every four years in various cities around the world. The theme of this years Expo is "Better City, Better Life" and all of the pavilions from cities around the world display their latest plans and technologies for creating greener, more sustainable cites. The Expo grounds are expansive and are split in the center by the Huang Pu river with the East side being referred to as the PuDong (literally "river east") and the West side is PuXi (poo-shee) Cynthia and Regan chose to stay home as Regan was extremely tired from his weekend retreat and Cynthia was just tired from being a wife and mother of three boys.
The day started out with a three wheeler ride from our apartment to the subway line. On the way we stopped to participate in a bit of morning tai chi. The master helped Mason and Landon strike the correct pose after several terse commands that none of us could understand. The master finally gave up and I took the picture.
On the subway we met one of the Expo workers, Sally, and she guided us to the ticket gate and made sure we were on our way before heading to her assignment. As we were walking to the gate a Chinese girl in front of us dropped her map and Mason picked it up to return it to her. We thought nothing of it until a few minutes later the same girl asked Mason if she could accompany us since she was travelling alone. She spoke limited English and we agreed to have a local companion to tour the Puxi side of the Expo. Our new friend's name was Kimi, she is 23 and works as a graphic designer for a construction company in Fujian. She was enamored with Landon and must have taken 50 pictures of him and with him. She had travelled to Shanghai to visit her sister and take in the sights during the National Holiday. We finally parted ways around 3:30 as she was heading to The Bund to continue her sight seeing there. It was nice to have someone who spoke Chinese help us get around and we all felt good that we could be her "friends" so she didn't have to be alone.
Speaking of photos - Landon was a hit! During the course of day we had several Chinese come up and want to take our picture - okay - Landon and Mason's picture. One little Chinese girl even thought Landon was pre-teen pop idol - Justin Bieber! The average daily attendance for the Expo is about 400 thousand and on the day we were there I could count on two hands the number of westerners visiting! We really were a minority and that probably accounted for some of the keen interest by the Chinese.
We are now out the door with the entire family this time to head to the PuDong side of the Expo. This is the more crowded and popular venue where the major country pavilions are located. Will have more to report tomorrow. Enjoy the new pictures on the blog and don't forget to click on an ad or two in order to generate funds for the local orphanage here. I will be posting a brief story on the orphanage so you can get a better idea of how the funds raised from Google Ads will be used.
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