Testing the senses in Shanghai to find China's best antitourism and off-beat secrets. Dry and sometimes funny observations from a fixed gear roller, food eater and photograph taker.

Normally when the funfair rolls into town you can hear the music at night, savor wafts of toffee apples on the breeze and see the Ferris wheel towering over the treetops on the town common.

Well, in Shanghai nobody notices even if it’s one of the world’s largest all the way in from Dubai. The sounds and smell gets sucked into the general horn-honking-meat-juice-cocktail and the Ferris wheel has no match for shanghai’s skyline. Literally nobody has heard of the Shanghai Carnival.

Spot the punters

Well that’s a little un-fair [groan]. Some people did notice and we thought we’d join them to see what will be going down for the next 100 days. Apparently a few fairground rides, a few more that aren’t open and not much else.

Going at it

Slathered over a couple acres of derelict expo site, the Shanghai Carnival is borrowing the ticketing and crowd control system from the Expo. Expect to endure the whole cattle-grid rigmarole one last time. You basically pre-pay for rides as part of the ticket price with a choice of 50 or 100RMB (which gets you an extra 10 for being so ace).

Oi! I can see the bottom of that skyscraper from here

You’ll not feel so ace when you realize there’s only about 3 rides worth going on that are actually running. Yes the Ferris wheel looked like it was turning before (The sacks they’ve put in there looked so lifelike from a distance). Most of the big thrill rides are not yet operational, the American Eggs, the Corkscrew, the Terminator – all closed. Hopefully they’ll be up and rattling the fillings out of punters before too long.

So instead we’re had our fillings rattled out on the hilariously fun Stern Von Rio, stomachs churned on the Pirate Ship, inner ears confused on the Chair-o-planes and brains completely dried out on probably the lamest the ghost train in the world.

Thrill. Located.

For some reason the star attraction is the Grasshopper. The queues were almost all the way across one empty expanse of concrete. For sure the Shanghai Carnival doesn’t quite have all the charm of a town-fields funfair – I didn’t even puke up my candy floss. They didn’t have any.

Flickr photo set with more photos here.

All the fun of the fair – with most of the fun of the fair taken away.

As the Design-Build network so eloquently stated “To meet demand, and to house its emerging middle class, Shanghai has sought inspiration from the Western nations that once dominated the city.“.

Amazing.

So we set forth to discover what’s happening in Shanghai’s “one city, nine towns” and so far have found that nothing much at all is going on in either Thames Town or Lake Mälaren.
Is Pujiang’s Italy Town going to buck the trend? Well, no.

But it does make for a nice ride. Heading down the Puxi side of the river below Xujiahui, catch a ferry across and through the grime of south-Shanghai to Pujiang. Then a straight run North up the Jiyang road, past the new Aquatic center and a loop around the expo site with some great perspectives on Shanghai from the South.

Link to Route

Of course, no tour of Shanghai would be complete without cruising past a few monstrous developments and might I say these are some of the city’s finest, lined up as if the cranes will pull of their covers to reveal pure residential monotony.

Across the river on the Sanlin Rd ferry and straight down a long suburban street-town with the typical steaming garbage piles, itchy dogs and cowboy babies. A couple of kilometers down on the left is the start of the Pujiang development.

… and yes, it’s empty. Just like it’s peers dotted around Shanghai it is an astronomical flop. Gregotti must have been so excited, the prospect of designing an entire town in China the way Italy would do it. How perturbed they must have been when the local hands started inputting their local craftsmanship. If only they knew at the time that nobody would move in apart from a few hopefuls, a couple of knock-off Italian furniture stores and a ginormously optimistic gym.

Italy Town is not particularly massive although construction is going strong like nobody has noticed. Nor is it a rendition of Lucca as you’d wish for, more of an expression of contemporary right-angle design complete with a not-in-the-slightest venetian canal lined with empty houses. We rolled a couple blocks, literally through a not-appalling modern art gallery (not that anybody noticed) and out up the number 8 Metro traced highway.

Shanghai’s latest landmark is the visually aggressive Aquatic Sports Center – due to hold the 14th World Aquatic Championships in July. The complex is not-nothing, big by Chinese standards and currently under typical Chinese progress with swarms of hard hats being observed by the construction equivalent of train spotters – the labour enthusiast.

They’ve only gone and built a new highway from the Aquatic complex up to the Expo site. Right now it is blissfully empty and super-smooth, curving up and over a new bridge with a pleasing perspective onto the metropolis.

Then it’s up and a loop through the decaying Expo site (which we’ll save for another post), over the Huangpu via the Ferry under the Nanpu Bridge and back along the north side. Home in time for a call by the Avocado Lady for some rocket and parmesan.

55k to Pujiang Italy Town Photoset with a couple extras.

As an indication of how hygienic the country is – these were plastered all over staff bathrooms in the Expo. If USA can write “employees mush wash hands before returning to work” everywhere – China can go one better!

Of particular value is the list of when to wash your hands, the last point is “whenever hands are dirty”. Pure revelation.

I wonder how many people followed the final instruction “rub hands with no-rinse alcohol gel for about 30 seconds until the alcohol evaporates” guess none.

Not long now before we’ll find an honest pancake on the side of the road, can take a rickshaw taxi from the metro station and the polystyrene men will roam free.

Maybe too, we’ll be released from Shanghai’s extortionate flight prices captivity…
the Expo 2010 is finally drawing to an end.

Unless they extend it for another month, those of us who’ve yet to go better start making arrangements. The ‘week-day nights when it’s baking hot and nobody will be there’ have passed; the ‘free ticket that I was promised by a guy in the Norwegian Pavilion’ quit his job ages ago and that gap between mid-autumn festival and the national holiday never really happened. We’re closing in on actually missing out… and to rub your face in it – they’ve put the price of a ticket up to 200RMB… and still one million people went last Saturday.

Thanks to being a graduate student I have both a suit and some free time during the day and so qualify as pavilion-meat. That and because I think the expo is pretty awesome I’ve been a handful of times.

This time was rather special though. Thanks to a very well-connected Icelandic pavilion director we were invited on a diplomatic VIP tour of the Expo’s finest… and North Korea.

So, here’s a frank run down of inside the most successful pavilions, the ones they’re queuing from 3 to 55 hours to enter. If you’ve not been yet – this is what you’re missing.

USA

Supposedly they built this in a few hours, which must be why it is such highly polished cheese. Three videos; the first is loads of Americans, including Hillary, saying ‘Ni Hao’ (hello). The next ones are blah togetherness blah children blah save the planet. It seems most people are here to photograph the Nanjing student who asks everybody to ‘move all the way along and find a seat’ in fluent mandarin.

Denmark

Look through a grubby window at Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid (they brought it over). Then do a couple loops around the roof of the worse-for-wear pavilion as people pootle by on bikes.

Saudi Arabia

Stand on a curved moving walkway that loops around a breathtaking elliptical auditorium immersed entirely in psychedelic projections of middle-eastern mosaics, satellite views and montages of exploding stars and germinating seeds. All the while staff members ninja around telling people off for taking photos.

Then be forced to walk up and then down seven stories of spiral walkway with nothing to see.

Thailand

The biggest let-down after the hype. Watch a promo video on a very low definition screen. Then be talked Disney-style through the history of Thailand by a dodgy animatronic totem pole. The finale is a “4D” promo video. Three of the Ds come from the glasses, the fourth comes from getting sneezed on by an elephant.

It’s all 1990s technology but it was funny to see that the locals were loving it, all with their arms outstretched as a mango hovered in the air in front of our eyes.

UAE

A slick and well produced series of videos that give a rather good impression of the UAE. They manage to slip in the pearls and the oil without too many shots of the Burj. Even better was when we were whisked by our experience-manager away from the crowds to a royal chamber for coffee and dates.

Japan

They got the textbook on expo pavilions and SMACK. This is how it should be done. Dainty hostesses lead us through the history of Japan, model houses and calligraphy. Then onto modern technology including talking vacuum cleaners and pavement tiles that collect kinetic energy. Then an onslaught of next-gen tech across two auditoriums. We’ve a robot that plays the violin, a 55 billion zoom digital camera, Mitsubishi’s version of the Segway and some Japanese opera about the plight of the would-be (if not for China) extinct crested Ibis.

China

Ascend into the monstrous red pavilion for an honestly moving story between two Chinese country-folk. Then step out of the way as 400 people try to squeeze out of the auditorium and rush down the three floors of the pavilion without looking at anything (go figure).

If they were interested they’d see a massive and stunning frieze that I can only describe as an intricately animated version of the Bayeux Tapestry (except depicting Chinese countryside) – look out for a guy who walks out of his house, yawns, falls over and lays on the ground snoring.

There are some Chinese artefacts, a model zero emissions house (that looks a bit tired). One floor is taken up with an “it’s a small world” style ride around – well – nothing significant. Then there’s a huge walkway of Expo-themed paintings by ‘infants’. Based on the quality they must all be savants.

Finally be lowered from the mother ship by a tractor-beam style escalator which goes through hydroponic lab arrangement of lilies being sprinkled by magic water that spells out “EXPO 2010”

There we have it

All in – 7 top dogs. If you don’t have an Expo angel though I wouldn’t justify waiting beyond half an hour for any of them. Instead, suck up the queue for the best by far – UK and spend the rest of your day with Chile: good food, cheap Pisco Sours and because every Pavilion overstocked: half price wine!

There was no better time than on a wet and miserable Sunday afternoon to visit the British Pavilion at the Expo.

Having successfully wangled our way into a few pavilions with our EU VIP passes (and successfully being denied entry to the German Pavilion by a clipboard wielding german-chinese-robot-woman), it was a particular pleasure to flash a UK passport and be whisked through the VIP entrance by a jovial and quintessentially British host. We made small-talk about the weather and Cameron before being ushered through a gate bypassing the three hour queue. Marvellous.

The British Pavilion truly is marvellous. Heatherwick has upgraded his Belsay and Barnards Farm Sitooterie into a 6 story high “Seed Cathedral” – a porcupine-like cube of some few-thousand needles.

Inside is a cave-like room of undulating walls formed from the inner-ends of the needles, each flares out slightly to encase the seed of a plant or flower seed. The sheer volume of points of light, like looking into a million microscopes at the same time and their non-digital repetition is delicious in comparison to the LCD heavy onslaughts in most pavilions.

A path spirals up around to the entrance of the strucure, showing along the way, The UK’s relationship between cities and green spaces (the concept of the Pavilion being bringing parks into the urban environment)

There’s no restaurant, no gift shop and the EXPO passport stamp is tied to a little table with a piece of twine. It’s all about the undulating grey and red astro-turf park on which sits the seed cathedral.