Onto Some More Rocks

So the next morning, I got up and ready to go to Yangshuo. I went to the cafe area of the hostel and ordered a sandwich, which was disappointing in the way that Western food made in Asian hostels usually is. Ya Ya, the girl I had agreed to go to Yangshuo with, also got up at the right time . . . I think at about 9:30am we set out for a bus to Yangshuo. It would be a short ride, but I did my best to make it horrible by allowing her to continue to talk to me about Taiwan.

A Few More Trips

I’m sitting now as I type this in the port of Mawei, a special district in the Chinese city of Fuzhou, located just across the straits of Taiwan. In approximately one and a half hours from the time I’ve started writing this, I’ll be aboard that boat, heading to Taiwan, and leaving China behind, for who knows how long.

This means a couple of things. First, it means that over the next couple days I’m going to crank out a couple of blog posts about previous travels that I haven’t yet covered, and maybe another couple of shorts about Shanghai.

A Trip Down the Thames . . . in Shanghai

A couple of days after the American Dream fiasco, I set off in the direction of yet another strange part of Shanghai that I had read about online. Only technically located within the administrative district of Shanghai, there was a housing development project in whats honestly another town, called SongJiang New City, where the community is designed to look as though it were old traditional England.

Yeah, you read that right. London in the suburbs of Shanghai. I can feel the eyes rolling now, and trust me, I did the same.

Breaking Into the American Dream

So, a few weeks ago, my former roommate Jillian Corey came to visit for a weekend. She was one of my three roommates from the first semester; although she went home for the Chinese holiday break during the month of February, she came back to China in March, but this time to Beijing, to pursue another semester of study. Finally she came down to visit, and amongst other things, we had one particular goal, which was to go break into the American Dream.

SMP, Shanghai's Barren Skatepark

So, you'll scarcely be able to find any information online about this place, although it does have its own website. Shanghai is home to the world's biggest skatepark, supposedly. Considering how there's no information on it on wikipedia, and its own website seems to have been updated last a couple years ago, I wouldn't be surprised if the record has since been broken.

Into the Expo

Its taken long enough, I know, but at last I bring you the expo post. I finally went to the Expo 2010 in Shanghai this week, and here I’ll share with you my impressions of the site and the event.

Some of you reading this definitely know of the expo, a few might actually know what it really is, and maybe one or two of you have actually been there. For pretty much everyone else, here’s some background information:

Also known as “World’s Fair”, these expos have their roots in the London Great Exhibition of 1851.

Everyone Loves a Model

Or at least, everyone in China loves BEING a model.

In truth, I should have quite a few more pictures to support this story, but I've since discovered that a good number of the ones that were relevant were way too washed out; also, if anyone can tip me on how to embed video into these blog posts, I can put up a couple of those also.

Anyway, so, roaming around Shanghai, if you go to any of the "nice" parts of the city, you have a better chance than you could ever expect of stumbling across a modeling photo shoot. Recently, a good friend of mine from San Diego, a guy named Nathan, came to visit for two weeks, and despite the fact that I've already been experiencing this phenomenon for about a full year, it was nevertheless amazing just how many models we came across. Almost every day, we saw at least one photo shoot.