From Taipei we can access all sites so I took a look at my blog and realized that most of my posts have been cut off. Everything after the first picture is lost so the last month of travel has been lacking in descriptions. I'll try and repost a few.
Here's the Shanghai one in full:
I knew Shanghai was a big city, but had no idea how massive it really was. The China book I have reports 18 million residents and 5 million migrant workers. You can see a glimpse of one area of the city here:
This is a view across the Huangpu river in Shanghai - we are on the west side of the river just a block from this walkway. We hope to go to a restaurant in the large Pearl Tower for lunch tomorrow as it has great views of Shanghai.
We've spent most of our time visiting the Expo grounds here. Our bodies ache from the last two days of walking. I think there are between 300,000 and 600,000 visitors per day! There are pavilions to see from nearly every country, and some have 3-4 hour lines. The good ones have restaurants with local food and drinks, and all of them show you unique things from each country. 
On day one we had lunch at the German pavilion. They had pretty good food and great beer.
We noticed many people collecting stamps from each pavilion in an expo passport and decided to get on board. I went from not knowing something existed to obsession really quick. In two days we filled up most of our passports with 40-50 stamps. It's fun to collect and a unique souvenir but some people take it too seriously. In a few cases I saw people with up to 100 things getting stamped in a row at each pavilion. They resell pre stamped passports for a markup. I can't imagine that would be fun. What's worse is the poor guys who get stuck on stamp duty. We don't think many people are saying thank you to them because when we do they always look surprised. 
It's not all bad though. We did find the Canada pavilion. The line was pretty big but our Canadian passports let us jump the queue and get right in. It felt just like home inside. In the evening they invited us back for a show where Dashan was performing (a very famous Canadian in China who speaks better Mandarin than many Mandarin speakers). We had plans already so couldn't make it.
Argentina had a cool pavilion and on the second floor there was a wine bar. We relaxed for a couple glasses of wine and a nice break from the crowds.
Here is the Spain pavilion at night. We didn't find time to go inside.
At night we met up with a coworker of mine and his brother in law for dinner at a nice Shanghai restaurant. They treated us to some amazing food - I tried some Octopus and Shanghai style Xiaolongbao (pork dumplings with crab). After dinner they took us around town and pointed out many of the local sites including a really popular bar street where we stopped for a drink. We wouldn't have been able to see that much of the city without their help so it was great.
Today was day two at the expo. We had a later start and got there after lunch. A lot of time was spent in the massive China pavilion which usually has long lines but today had no line. We had dinner at a Belgian restaurant and some Belgian waffles for desert.
The expo is massive and lots of fun but I think we are too tired to try it for a third day. Tomorrow we will try and see some local Shanghai sites.
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