We all got up at 8am to go to the Expo. Except Marisa didn't because she was up until 5, and inspired by this, Lloyd and I agreed to put it off and go back to sleep. At 11am we went to a Korean place for brunch. I like this leisurely life. We has Korean Stonepot - mine was kim chi and some meet or other - good stuff.
We then headed into Pudong, which is basically the other side of the river. This is the financial area which is home to Shanghai's skyscrpapers. Lots of them. There is a park called Central Park which is surrounded by them and there are no normal sized buildings in sight. Why bother, hey?
We went up Shanghai Financial Centre, for 150 RMB or about £15. This has the highest viewing gallery of any building in the world. It's a nice looking building, much like a massive bottle opener. Interestingly the first few floors appear to made from brick in a Chinese style, before obviously reverting to steel. Much of the building seems to be there for the purpose of getting to the floors above. There are a huge number of escalators and staircases, seemingly leaving room for little else.
We went to around floor 90 in the first lift. There were some cool flashing light effects in the lift; they were really trying to put on a show. You can pay less and only be allowed this far up, but we thought "in for a penny...". The view from here is superb, and you can look up to see the higher platform, above the hole which make the building look like a bottle opener. There was a display on the history of expositions, starting with the first one at Crystal Palace. This was unusually informative for the Chinese who are surprisingly uninclined to provide any information that you might be intersested in at this sort of thing. We went to the 100th floor using the stairs because we were told this would be the quickest way. Kind of unimpressive, but it was cool that the stairs were individually numbered.
The view from the very top was a little better and it was great to get an overall view of the city. Different areas have buildings with different coloured roofs which made a cool effect and the river looked stunning, much like the view from The Peak at Hong Kong.
Later we went to Tian Zi Fang which is a very trendy area with alleys full of boutiquey shops and art galleries. And expensive bars, one of which we went to for a quick beer before dinner. We got fairly shocking service to Amelia had to get slightly arsey and click her fingers at them. Which amused me.
Round the corner was the place that was the reason for us being there. The 100 RMB burger challenge. Eat a kilogram of burger in ten minutes and get it free, and get a photo on their wall too. They had a model of the burger outside to get people in; it was fairly intimidating.
When the burgers came, a man came with a stopwatch and Lloyd and I started eating. We had done some thinking about strategies, and mine was to get stuck in early to make up some headway before the inevitable lethargy. Unfortunately I decided the spend the first minute arsing about by slowly dipping the chips in the ketchup before exaggeratedly savouring them. Note that nobody mentioned chips before we got the burger. But then I got down to business.
After five minutes I was more than half done, but it started to get more difficult. My jaw was getting very tired from the chewing and the food seemed to be backing up in my body. This was clearly an interesting spectacle for Amelia and Marisa. Marisa declared that she was full after eating a third of her tiny burger, to our amusement. Amelia had an anaemic-looking salad. I finished the burger just as the 10 minutes were up. Lloyd finished maybe 85% of his. The bill came and both burgers were listed on there, as I hadn't managed the chips, but we couldn't be bothered to argue. I think the two of us were mainly concerned with trying to breathe.
We paid and left, but when we saw that there were no chips on the model we felt a bit aggrieved. Merisa used her best Mandarin to start complaining but the manager came and they switched to English. The argument was seemingly lost until Marisa used the magic word "cheated" and the manager gave us the 100 RMB note which I said we would put towards the next round. He took my photo with a polaroid camera and put it on the wall, but I'm convinced they've put it on the dartboard or fashioned a voodoo doll in my image, or something similar.
We had the promised round of drinks in a bar. Some really crappy cocktails for the others though I stuck to the safety of Erdinger. A fun night overall.
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