We spent our first day at the Exhibition Hall. It was beyond amazing - a fantastic dream crossed with a nightmare. We saw some incredible things, performances and artworks, but the volume of noise was overwhelming. The Egyptian travel booth across from ours had belly dancers and Rumi Sufi twirlers and had their sound system turned up full blast. But that didn't matter since EVERYONE had their sound system turned up full blast...it's like sonic war escalation.
The Exhibition is in 8 or 10 huge connected halls, and we have a tiny booth in the center of one of them. We sat at the booth in the morning. We talked to many people, visitors to the booth, and almost all of the promotional materials we brought with us were cleaned out by noon. It was a lot of fun but exhausting. About mid-morning, just as Wei had promised, the heads of the city, provincial and national governments came by, surrounded in a knot of TV cameras and photographers, and we were introduced and shook hands. I think that's how we got on Chinese TV , but none of us saw it so we don't know if it was from this incident or from the small riot we caused at the paper-cut art booth later that day...
Yesterday, traveling through the airport and crossing the border at customs with other travelers, we felt like walking disease vectors, being obviously from the US and all, but today I felt like Big Bird from Sesame Street as I stood out so much in the crowd, and a few people followed me around to get my picture... We stopped in one booth to buy some cool paper cut art and caused a scene. People were snapping pictures and asking us to pose with them and shake hands... now I know what Britney Spears must feel like with the paparazzi after her... or sort of.
Everyone is very friendly and relaxed and happy to try and talk to us and help, but not many people speak English and we can only say 'shi shi', which is 'thank you' in Chinese, but that goes a long way...
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