Bye Shanghai

So I'm back from my 'field trip' to Shanghai and the World Expo. It was a-mazing! First Shanghai; the skyline is incredible...it must rival any city in the world. I had a bit of time to walk up and down Nanjing Street which is the commercial street in Shanghai. It begins at a Madame Tussauds (my first time visiting a wax museum!) and ends at the Huang Pu river. The river cuts the city in two and on one side is this super modern skyline and on the other side are a collection of beautiful European style architecture buildings built in the first half of the 1900's when Shanghai was first emerging as an international financial center. It's stunningly beautiful.

The Expo was an experience I'm really glad I got to have. I spent three full days with my students checking out the different pavilions and still missed a good portion of it. That said, by the end of 3 10 hour days I was plenty ready to be done with the Expo. The pavilions were mostly really good and some were brilliant. For those of you who don't know (like me a month ago), each country sets up a building and a display inside the building. In theory each country presents the best of itself whether it be science, arts, vision, history, culture or some combination. Canada held it's own, in my opinion...but the real stunners were the Czech Republic, Italy, UK and a number of smaller countries that I really had no expectations for...like Uzbekistan, for example. Really poorly done were Australia and Israel. I was really disappointed in Israel after a LONG wait there just wasn't much content. Nobody held a candle to North Korea however. Stunningly bad. They would have been better off leaving it empty to provide the illusion that they were just slow in getting set up.

Check out the pics at: www.flickr.com/photos/44196127@N04/