Saturday, September 25, 2010
Uniforms at the USA Pavilion
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Time schedule for life and judges
Typical work day
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Food in and around the Expo
Living in Shanghai: Food inside the Expo Village and the Expo park
One of the most important questions to deal with every day is “What should I eat?” The answer to this question can be difficult, considering the culinary diversity surrounding and within the Expo Village. For every price range, time of day, speed of service, and distance from where I live, there are several options.
Within the Expo, there are several overpriced restaurants such as Bubba’s BBQ, NY Pizza, Masala Art Indian Cuisine, more than one sushi restaurant, Crazy Chicken, and several others. All of them were expecting far more business than they received, and some of them actually were not expecting much business but were forced (coerced) into opening a location inside the Village.
NY Pizza was one of the restaurants that did not receive as much business as its owners had expected (imagine pizza hut with 4 people inside on a Friday night). Maybe it’s because the crust was too thin and plain, the service was too slow, and they fell victim to the mistake of not bringing appetizers before the meal (very common in China).
Bubba’s BBQ was insanely expensive as well, but at least the food was somewhat tasty. Bubba came to China expecting to make a killing off of the money that visitors from all over the globe brought by taking advantage of how isolated the Village is and how much trouble it is to go elsewhere for food.
Masala Art Indian Cuisine is like many Indian restaurants: overpriced yet tasty. The menu contains a wide selection of Indian dishes from many different locations in India, several of which I have eaten and enjoyed.
For those Expo Village residents who have neither the time nor the money for one of those restaurants, there is always Family Mart; Family Mart is a common and popular chain of convenience shops throughout many cities in China and Japan. They offer several daily necessities, a large selection of beverages, prepared foods such as sushi and sandwiches, etc. It is the perfect option for parties (Qingdao is a popular and very cheap beer in China), late night meals, and even as a meeting place at one of their several tables.
Inside the Expo, there are many interesting and delicious options for park visitors and employees alike; KFC, Wishdoing, Papa John’s, Kung Fu Combo, Burger King, and Pizza Hut are several of the well known brands of restaurants available inside. Each one has lowered its variety in order to speed up service, for example Papa John’s only offers 4 different pizza options and they are cooked far in advance of when they are actually sold. For those without much money, there are several convenience stores (like Family Mart), small food booths with cheap stuffed buns and special Chinese desserts, and the many excellent staff cafeterias (staffeteria, for many of us). The one I would routinely go to has a wide variety of intricately prepared foods, rich with nutritious soups, vegetables, fish and meat options, a dessert booth with ice cream and muffins, and a beverage counter. All of the food there is incredibly cheap, mainly because it is subsidized by the Expo Bureau, and is thus unavailable to guests (the food can only be paid for with food credits deposited at the Expo Bureau itself). Almost all of my lunch breaks were at the Staffeteria so I saved a lot of money over eating at Family Mart or Burger King.
Many of the various pavilions also had small restaurants in which you could buy mostly authentic food from that country; the spices, vegetables, and preparation methods were all brought by the people who left their countries to work at the Expo. The Sri Lanka pavilion has excellent curry sauces, meat pies, and breads; the Norway pavilion has a delicious, fresh, and wide assortment of Norwegian seafood dishes; the Pakistani pavilion has BBQ shish kabobs, traditional Pakistani curry dishes, rice casseroles, and more; unfortunately, the USA Pavilion outsourced its restaurant and retail management to an Australian company called IVG, which decided that fast food (Quick serve restaurant) would be cheaper and thus make more money than serving various American foods would have been.
FedEx visits USAP
FedEx Visits USAP
FedEx is another one of the USAP’s cash-only sponsors, and as part of the sponsor level they were on, they were allowed to schedule several special events and lectures using either our conference/dining room or the 1776 Lounge (bar and lounge area). Many times over my first 2 months at the USAP, I would tell everyone in the Sponsorship department that, because FedEx’s headquarters was in my city, I would greatly appreciate the chance to meet some of their representatives when they visit our pavilion. One time, I had the chance!
Many of you will recall that, at the USAP, I was responsible for delivering the payment to China Mobile to pay the bills for all the pavilion-sponsored cell phones. On July 9th, I left the USAP at 16:00 to deliver the payment to China Mobile; when I arrived, I discovered that I had left the check at work in my file cabinet! I returned to the USAP at 18:00 to retrieve the check and upon my return to the USAP, I decided to enter the VIP entrance to climb the stairs to the second floor office. The stairwell leading to the second floor of the pavilion on that side opens directly across from the dining room in which a special event was being held. I had a strange feeling that it was FedEx’s event, and sure enough when I asked a random suit-wearing man “Which organization is having an event tonight,” he told me that it was FedEx and that he was representing an American office. I told him that I was from Memphis and a USAP student ambassador, and he invited me to the event to meet several Chinese and American FedEx employees!
The event’s subject was corporate social responsibility, with a focus on the environmental impact of industrialization and overconsumption. After the first lecture, I was introduced to the representative of FedEx Shanghai’s corporate outreach and social responsibility office, and she was very happy to meet me. She has visited Memphis, including the FedEx hub, headquarters, and Graceland, and was eager to establish outreach connections with a student group I was involved in, called GCC (Global Chinese Connections). The power of luck and excellent timing has won again in my life!
Harmful Mold
The danger of rushing construction
The Shanghai Expo is staffed partly by several thousand volunteers and employees, some of which live in the area adjacent to gate 6 of the Expo, called Expo Village. Inside Expo Village, there are several ethnic restaurants, shops where you can buy antiques, a convenience shop and 2 apartment complexes. The apartment complexes, Donghu (where I lived) and Jinjiang (where I wish I had lived) are different in regards to their facilities and construction: Jinjiang apartments have a computer for use by the residents, machines to dry clothes, and weekly maid service, while Donghu has more land area, beautiful landscaping, and illness-causing mold inside the walls of the apartments. Several of my coworkers at the USAP have had terrible allergic reactions to the mold, symptoms of which include difficulty breathing, abnormal acne and skin rashes, nosebleeds, nausea, fever, and more. The mold is due to shoddy construction which left areas in the walls where moisture could come in, and Shanghai being as humid as it is, moisture settles in.
Eventually, our repeated complaints caught the ears of the supervisors who contacted the main office of Donghu apartments and threatened to cease rent payments on all rooms until the problem was solved. The problem has been treated as cosmetic, meaning that the staff members responsible for cleaning projects were sent to scrape the mold off the walls, scrub them, and then paint over the areas. The deeper issue is not being solved.
After Donghu failed to solve the problem, USAP staff needed proof that the rooms contained harmful mold, so lucky for us, Ecolab is one of the USA Pavilion’ s sponsors and cares about its well being. Ecolab is a chemical sanitizer-producing company that has supplied many of the required cleaning solutions as part of their sponsorship agreement. After investigating several rooms, they discovered that most of the rooms had water damage but only 2 had dangerous mold; this meant that the people who claimed illness from non-dangerous mold having rooms had to be suffering from something else entirely. Hooray for experts!
On a personal note, many of you will notice that I have facial hair in several of my pictures; this is because I was afflicted by a terrible rash and acne on my face. Since leaving Donghu, my face has cleared up significantly, so the people who said it was not due to the mold were obviously wrong.