Expo Benefits

So, in addition to the HUGE drive to clean up and green up Shanghai City the Expo has other benefits too. Until the end of the Expo its possible to avoid the normal list of official paperwork and form filling needed to transfer RMB into a foreign currency. Instead all that is needed is your passport and for the value of money that you have exchanged into foreign currency, this year, to be less than $50 000 USD in value. For values over 50 000USD you need to do something special - although I didn't bother finding out what that was on the account of not having 50 000 USD.

So, if you need to get your RMB out of China it's best to do it before this October.

Expo!

So we finally got to the Expo (after Tanya generously let us steal her tickets for a day - Thank you Tanya!). The place is HUGE, and we spent most of the day (and a bit of the evening) just wondering around the site looking at the pavilions, and considering the fact that most of the queues were 3-4 hours long, we only managed to go inside two pavilions: the first was the Netherlands - which had a very fast moving queue and the Phillpines which had NO queue on the account that the inside held almost zero cultural interest and looked like a cross between a night club and a trinket shop.

Israel had a very funky pavilion

...but it was apparently being held together by duct tape

[Left] There were people sleeping on benches (and on grass) all over the site, and after walking around for 4 hrs it started to look like a great idea.
[Right] Kids with Haibao dolls

Resting in the shade playing cards - please note the 'expo seats' which 90% of people were carrying around.

[Left] British Pavilion [Right] Korean Pavilion with a really cool facade made up of Korean characters

Italian Pavilion

Start of the Expo?

We were on the way to the airport and drove past a convey of army truck full of guards... probably being ferried into increase security in the lead up to the Expo on the 1st May...

The Rumoured Free Expo Tickets...

So there has been a rumour floating around for the last few months that there would be some snazzy benefits for Shanghai residents as a form of compensation for having to host the Expo 2010.

The first rumour suggested that there would be holidays for people working in Shanghai on the 30th April and 3rd of May. So that there could be some reduction in congestion for the opening weekend of the Expo, by eliminating the normal commuting load on the transport systems...allowing Shanghai to be taken over by the Expo visitors. Sadly this wasn’t exactly the case, companies are obviously not that keen on just giving 2 extra days of holidays to workers, especially when they have to pay them for not actually doing any work, so it's actually turned into 'all offices will be shut' days, but with most companies expecting people to work from home instead.

The other rumour was about each household being given a free Expo ticket and a transport card with a value of 200RMB (that is a LOT of travel - especially if you are planning to use the metro and buses). We just got a notice in our mail box the other day (like yesterday) confirming it. It turns out that even foreigners can claim their free ticket and transport card. It seems to be being organised by each local neighbourhood committee.

Basically the note said:
Each family, which has been registered in shanghai for more than 6 months is entitled to 1 ticket and 1 transport card. In order to claim the ticket and transport card you need to take your passport and residence permit or home visit permit (HK and Macao) or more than 6months visa endorsement to the neighbourhood committee between the 25th - 28th April, with the address of the neighbourhood committee in our compound.