Shanghai Expo and Leavetaking

The morning of the Shanghai Expo, we left fairly late in the morning. I think many of us are, while not looking forward to the actual flight, looking forward to slowing down a bit. The weather was incredibly hot. The kind of hot that made it difficult to function in Singapore, Miami, everywhere I’ve been too far south of Seattle. I loved Alaska, though, especially when it was raining and gray… in any case, it was very, very hot.

We all split up after taking the first few group shots, and made our way around the Expo. The lines were incredibly long at some of the pavilions, and we heard that you had to have reservations for the Taiwan exhibit. Some of us eventually made our way over to the Europe pavilions, as our resident architecture expert Juli told us they were worth seeing – and she was right. The UK exhibit was like a giant metal porcupine, and the Germany exhibit was a really neat angular thing. Definitely enjoyed viewing them, but the lines…. Not gonna happen.

I wanted to see the Austria exhibit, and Claudia wanted to see the Sweden exhibit, so we continued on through the Expo park after some of the others took off. Even the Austria exhibit had an hour long line. We finally felt like we hit pay dirt when we reached the shared European pavilion that contained San Marino, Liechtenstein, Cyprus, and a few other small European countries – no lines! It was like getting free candy, but better.

The final going away dinner was the best dinner we’d had in China, which is saying a lot. The food here has been really amazing. There was an orange fish that was so perfectly cut and prepared that you could just take the breaded and sauce covered chunk directly off of the fish, no bones. Highly impressive – but not as impressive as the house specialty, their roast pork. It was a slow roast pork that just about melted off of the rib that was dipped in sweet and sour sauce, then in panko bread crumbs, and then wrapped in a piece of lettuce and eaten like a spring roll. I cannot go into enough raptures about how amazing the flavors and textures of that particular dish were.

Our evening entertainment was a karaoke parlor, Chinese style. Normally, there’s a professional running the karaoke machine, and you just submit a piece of paper and sing awkwardly in front of strangers. This was a private booth type place, where you run the machine (which is in Chinese) yourself, and then sing awkwardly in front people you actually know. Much more awkward. But, I do love to sing, so it was fun. All in all, a great ending to a great trip.