Shanghai EXPO--fascinating!

When I chat with one of my friends on Internet the other day, he asked me whether I am going back China this summer for the 2010 Shanghai EXPO. Although I intensely want to witness the huge event by myself, the summer course keeps me here. In order to comfort me, my friend sent me some pictures of the pavilions. From the first glance of the pictures, I got astonished. So I thought, why not talk about?

The China Pavilion at Shanghai Expo is designed by Jingtang He, a man who also designed the Badminton Hall and the Wrestling Hall for the 2008 Beijing Olympic. As known to all, China has a long history. What I would like to say is that this pavilion definitely well represent Chinese culture and history.


The building is located in the centre of its exhibition area, in its square shape. Just stand there, dignified. This may well remind people of other significant building in China, such as the Forbidden City. As a matter of fact, the Forbidden City is a place that everyone comes to China should visit. So if you come to see the Shanghai Expo, the China Pavilion is the building you can’t miss.

As you can tell from the first sight, the color of the Pavilion is Chinese red-- a warm color but not so bright. No doubt that this representative color of China delivers a sense of history and make people want to come into the pavilion to know more about the country. For years, Chinese people fight their way to where they are today. The nation has a history of blood, a history of red.

Now take a look at the upper side of the building. It looks like a cap and the material just cluttered up layer by layer, just like the Chinese culture, accumulated through 5,000 years from less to more. It’s continues, every dot is connected.

While on the other hand, the lower part of the pavilion is just like a up-side-down cap. The biggest part is on the ground and get smaller on every stage. Obviously, what the designer want to express is that a good foundation is essential no matter for the building of a pavilion of for the building of a country. Besides the cultural meaning, the two opposite parts express great illusions of volume and space

Last but not least, the fences around the building attract my attention. If you are familiar with Chinese culture, you will recognize that they are old seal words. But if you are not familiar with Chinese culture, don’t you find it fascinating that what the fence represents is actually words with meanings?

All in all, I hope you get interested in the Shanghai Expo after seeing this. There are definitely pavilion for America wait you to find the American culture expressed by it. Be sure come to witness it if you have the chance, no doubt it will worth the trip.

Try again for public writing.

Well, to be honest, this is not my first attempt to write a blog. I tried once in my high school. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out well. I used to treat blog like a more personal thing, writing things like diary and just express personal feeling. But as a matter of fact, it turns out that people sometimes may try to make things sounds better when they intends to go public. And there are times that feelings can be too personal to share, even I intended to. These are all reasons that held me back from keeping a blog running. Right, sometimes I got lazy and forget what to say afterwards. That’s another reason. Maybe this blog can be a more public one, I don’t know, just hoping that everyone can enjoy the process. It sounds fun, right?
Talking about other public writing experience, I had one before. It was interesting and challenging. In the summer of 2008, I went to the AIDS Village with some of my friends to do some research. We went to a small school where AIDS orphans are supported by the government. After spending two weeks with them, we had a close view of their life and made friends with them. After I came back home, I wrote an article describing the very experience as well as expressing my feelings during the whole unforgettable trip. Then, the article was posted on the school’s newspaper as well as on the websites of a couple other newspapers. The whole process was exciting, hoping that people would be intersted in my article, checking from times to times for feedbacks. I think I was lucky for actually having people’s attention in my work and got several feedbacks. It felt good to let other people know things from what I wrote, especially knowing that some people did things like donations to help the orphans after they had read the article.
That’s it, my short public writing experience. Hope you didn’t get bored while reading it.