Thanks for letting us know how your first day went!

Hey, glad to hear you made it to China! I'm exhausted just reading this... Will you be doing a TR while you're traveling?

We two old Aussies are just back from four days in Shanghai too, spending two at expo. We are early risers, and independent travellers, so we went early. It was so hot, as Patrick said, and we are nearly seventy, so we found it tiring, but fun.

We caught a ferry from the northern end of the Bund the first day, and a bus from the southern end the next day. The bus involved further ferry crossings at the expo sight. Both efficient, bit of a walk from the bus in the heat, so we caught a taxi back.

We saw the French Pavillion (don't bother), the Spanish had a great sound and light in a long cave-like tunnel, with a Spanish dancer at the end of the film, and a really enormous animatronic baby with differing facial expressions looking down at you. Turkey had exhibits from ancient times, effectively displayed (Ephesus and Miletus), as did Angola. Denmark has the original Little Mermaid, loved it. Australia's is well done too, telling our history with comical figurines and state of the art movie theatre in the round.

Lots of pavillions had two, three, four or more hour waits - no way! Nothing is worth standing around in 100degree heat for that long, though the cooling systems for a lot of queues were good - otherwise, there would be bodies everywhere.

At 10am, we could have reserved the Chinese Pavillion for 6pm, maybe. But we didn't have the energy to wait around that long, unfortunately. I hope NeoPatrick is standing up to the heat better!

That said, our room at the Seagull on the Bund was brilliant, with views from the Pearl Tower and high rise Pudong, straight down the S bend in the river and right down the Bund with its interesting human activity, greenery and European buildings, and around to the Garden Bridge. I don't think you could get a more interesting place to spend a few hours recovery - watching in air conditioned comfort - a life saver! After the brightly lit tour boats stopped cruising round about 11pm, the barges came by at least every thirty seconds, sometimes three or four at a time, laden with coal or other goods.

I think one day to water town is worth to go, I suggest travel to wuzhen one day.

Patrick:

Wow, you're in my birthtown already! Thanks for the mini report on the World Expo, I feel for you, with all the walking in that kind of heat, it's a challenge.

My vote for the one day watertown is Tongli, see what your friend proposes.

Yesterday's paper in Shanghai reported that Wed. when we were at Expo was the hottest day of the year on record -- at 39.5. That's 103. It also mentioned that there were fewer people at Expo due to the extremee heat. I'm glad I didn't know it was THAT hot or it would have seemed worse, but it is cooling off a day or two at a time now supposedly.

Off to Hangzhou today.

Don't get me started on how involved Hangzhou became. We bought train tickets to there the day before, but foolisly waited until we got to Hangzhou in the morning to buy return tickets -- uh-oh -- they were all sold out. My friend said not to worry, that we'd take a bus -- lots of buses -- so at the end of the day we took a city bus to the North "long distance" bus terminal (that took 1 hour and 15 minutes to get there, only to find that the last bus from there had left at 6 (it was now nearly 7), but they showed a bus from the south terminal which according to the computer still had 20 places left at 8:15. So off we went in a taxi to the south station, only to arrive just in time, but no places on the bus after all -- so another taxi to the train station to see if anyway we could get on a late train -- nope all sold out. So we ended up taking an ("illegal"?) bus for 65 each (the deluxe train is 54), buying out tickets from a hawker at the train station where they knew all trains were sold out and suddenly came up with a bus to run for cash only.

So we got back to Shanghai South Train station at about 11:45 and then took a taxi to our hotel (no subways still running. Phew.

So regarding Tongli? We heard buses were selling out, and it was very scary after our experience yesterday. I wanted to do the Shanghai Museum and Jing'an Temple which we did, then my friend said we could go to another water village closer -- so we did -- Zhujiajiao which is at the end of line 2 and then a one hour ten minute bus. I don't know what the other water towns are like, but this one was just fine, seemingly all Chinese tourists and not American ones at all. Had a boat ride, walked a couple miles, and had a great dinner of odd things.

Sorry to drone on and this will be in full trip report I promise.

By the way, so much for that famous advice here "never buy your tickets before last minute". But I guess that doesn't count for anything near Shanghai when Expo is going on. It's a zoo here to do anything right now.

Uh-oh it is, your "friend" is out of touch, locals know well to buy round trip tix for short train or bus trips. At least he got you to Zujiajiao, my bro-in-law was born there and his nephew runs the porcelain goods store near the 2nd bridge. Watertowns are lovely tho in my opinion "see one, seen all".

If you haven't been, spend 1/2 hour at the super crowded Old Town Bazaar, peek at the elegant little Suzhou-style garden; then take a walk in the relatively quiet area of the old french concession starting from Huashan Road walking south on Wukang Road, stop for a drink/bite at "Lost Heaven" along the way on Gaoyuo Road, that will sooth your frazzled nerves.

Shanghainese, too funny. My friend did admit that he has never been to Tongli, although he has a friend there.
And his exact words were "if you've seen one water town, you've seen them all."

The funny thing about buying tickets to Hangzhou is that I found them on line for something like $8 each and I could reserve the day before, but sounding like someone who posts here, he insisted that would be paying too much and the ONLY way to do it is to go to the train station, where we stood in line over half an hour to pay the same price for them that they were online -- without the lines. What am I missing here? We went to the train station to buy the tickets to Hangzhou just before they closed at 9:30 PM -- sure enough at 9:30 they closed the lines and the hundreds left standing in line couldn't buy any tickets. As he said the lines during the day are often hours long -- at night it was only a half hour line, but we nearly got messed up because he thought it was open till 10 and not just 9:30.

Part of the reason for his selecting Zuijiajio is that you CAN'T buy the bus tickets in advance, it is a local, first come-first served bus which was fine and which runs every 20 minutes fro the end of Line 2.

We did quite a walk in the French Concession the other day, which I really enjoyed, and I guess that Old Town Bazaar is the place by Yu Gardens? Crowded doesn't begin to describe it. Also a surprising highlight was a visit to the library where he had to return and pick up some books for his parents. I found the whole process fascinating.

Patrick, I think many of us would enjoy following along on your SE Asia trip. What do you think about a separate thread devoted to your trip?

"Also a surprising highlight was a visit to the library where he had to return and pick up some books for his parents. I found the whole process fascinating." - sounds interesting - how was it different from your library in the US?

I agree with Marija - I was expecting a NeoPatrick TR thread...

I plan to do a regular trip report, just got a little carried away here.

How was the library different? Well, more computer oriented than ours -- everything is done by computer. But he returned several types of books and each had to be returned to a different department. Then to take out a book, he found it on the computer -- they have rows of them, and filled out a request online, then waited about 10 minutes and picked up that book at the desk. You never look at actual books so far as I could tell, except for a room with ancient books.

Very interesting NeoPatrick - I actually do most of my library stuff by computer these days (search the catalog and request the book online, get an email when it's available, pick it up from a special section of the library, maybe check it out myself, renew online) but I can certainly wander around the bookshelves if I want to.

I also thought it was interesting that they checked each book very carefully, rifling through all pages -- presumably to make sure no pages were missing. And I suppose I'm probably simply out of touch living in a small town -- probably most big city US libraries are much more computerized these days as well.

Well, my library isn't up to Shanghai standards - no 10 minute turnround! And I sometimes wish they would check books when they're returned (although it's far too labor intensive for the US) - I recently found that the map in the back of Fodor's Montreal had disappeared from most of the copies.

Interesting about the library and how they check the books upon return. It's not only the library! While checking out of a Chinese hotel, the desk clerk excused himself to go check the room, presumably to make sure I didn't steal any hangers or the shoe horn. If I hadn't been forewarned of this practice, I'd have started to wonder if maybe I have that kleptomaniac look about me LOL.

I'd forgotten about that, Nutella. Happened to me too in Chinese hotels away from the east coast.