As Seen by TV

EXPOdition Pt. II
August 8, 2010 – 390,700 visitors

Thanks to the Israeli Pavilion, we got VIP tickets to the pavilions of Israel, Japan, France, and Spain. I also dropped by Finland and Belgium, and take it from me, you can skip the French one, unless you really need to see more pictures of Paris and have never seen a Citroën. Japan was interesting, you certainly don’t see a robot playing a violin every day. The Spain pavilion is a definite success, the wicker building, great cave-like entrance and then the infamous gigantic moving baby, something I will not forget any time soon.

Also pictured are the pavilions of Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, and of course China. In my Danish Pavilion image, if you squint, you can see the Little Mermaid statue which was taken outside of Denmark for the very first time (unless you count all the times it has been stolen and vandalized; of which including 4 decapitations, an amputated arm, numerous paintings, and the addition of a dildo).

Those final images are from inside the Smurftastic Belgium Pavilion, another one worth visiting (without my bias). The Expo Axis (the massive tent construction in the images before the Smurf invasion) is the largest membrane construction in the world, whatever that means.

You will also notice all the water being sprayed in the air… temperatures hit 40C that day.

View my post and all the imagery from EXPOdition Pt. I.

For Tanley’s day-off we visited Jing’an Temple by day and then took the Line 2 subway (sorry for the bad pic, but someone was really asking what they looked like) over to Pudong and hit up Century Park by night…

It’s a shame that it’s been raining all day, as I’ve wanted to go explore the festivities planned for today.  The firework spectacle takes place in just over an hour, so I’m sure I’ll have a glimpse of that.
As for yesterday, I certainly heard a ton of explosions, and assumed they were fireworks… but I couldn’t see/find the damn things.   I ended up going to Pudong, taking metro line 2 to Dongchang Road and walking back to the Lujiazui station (I live nearby the Line 1 South Shanxi station, you can check out a subway map here).  The clouds were absolutely sensational… the colored lights from buildings literally saturated the sky, and once again impeccable timing, as it started raining just when I was wrapping up.

The first two images are panoramas, the vertical consisting of 8 images, and the [messed up] 360-degree horizontal of 13 (the building with the antenna just off-center is the stock exchange).
Also check out the differences in clouds between a 1.6sec and 30sec exposure.  You can even notice a blue radiance on the top right, from the blue lights that decorate the front/back of the Shanghai World Financial Center… not to mention the amazing glow from the apartment buildings to the left.

I have more images (I took about 140, which is more than double the standard Tim Shoot), but these are the only ones I cleaned up, more will be added later.  Have a good night/day wherever you may be and Happy 60th Birthday PRC!!
[also happy birthday to my Italian brother Salvo, have a good one yo!]

Dope video from the crazy parade in Beijing by Dan Chung: