Bacation

I didn't get my "summer vacation" during the all-too-brief summer break, so I'm going to take it right around Chuseok: spending a week in Shanghai and visiting Expo2010, as I mentioned a few posts ago. Even more costly than airfare (a reasonable 357,000 W return ticket) will be the hotel, since they are gouging tourists because of the Expo--about 130,000 W per night! That price can be beat, but not anyplace close in to the city; my hotel is in "The Bund", a short distance from the Expo site, and quite near, even in the middle of, many of Shanghai's other attractions.

The Bund is, according to my Lonely Planet city guide (29,690 W at Bandi & Luni's), "Mainland China's most iconic concession-era backdrop and a source of intense local pride ... Coming to Shanghai and missing the Bund is like visiting Beijing and by-passing the Forbidden City or the Great Wall." The Bund, and the French Concession to the west, are remnants of the colonial era when Europe's great powers apportioned themselves "concessions" of land in China starting in the early 1800s.

Anyway, while the accommodation is expensive, most other things are pretty reasonable: a three-day Expo pass is RMB 400, or about 70,000 W; the full 3 1/2 hour Huangpu River boat tour is RMB 150, or 26,000 W; museums are typically RMB 20 to 30, or 3,500 to 5,000 W. 3-day tickets for the Zaragoza Expo 2008 (a minor World's Fair), for comparison, were 70 Euros--about 50% more. The last "universal" Expo, Hannover 2000, charged 69 DEM, or 50,000 W per day.

There still is not a great deal of English information available online about the 2010 World's Fair, but I found a nice blog post titled How to Survive the Shanghai Expo--exactly what I need to know! I found a bloke from Nottingham who's blogging his Shanghai visit even as we speak (so to speak), here, as is a self-styled bon vivant named Jason, here. Of course, Xinhua News has a special section devoted to the Fair, which is quite thorough but rather one-sided.

Less than a month to go.