After having spent the last few days adjusting to the climate and timezone of Shanghai we are finally starting to feel at home here. We feel we can find our way around in the city and we have found a few places where they have cheap but good food. We have even gone to see the central parts of Shanghai and gone up the big skyscraper that looks like a giant bottle-opener. It is the worlds third tallest building and it has the worlds second highest observation deck. It's closest neighbor is another skyscraper which is the worlds eight tallest building. It is a strange feeling standing in one building looking down on a 421 m tall building.

On Monday we finally went to the Expo. There are a lot of countries and a lot of cities represented at the Expo, and sustainable building is a major theme at the Expo, so we had hoped to get some information on green roofs from the pavilions and the exhibition booths. But it seems a large part of the represented cities and countries are using the Expo as a forum for tourism, and most of the information they provide is in Chinese, so we went to the Malmö booth instead to talk to the people working there. The Malmö booth has much more useful information on sustainable building than the other booths.

We talked to some of the Swedish and Chinese people working in the Malmö booth which resulted in a tour to the Beijing booth for some information on the green roofs of the Olympic village in Beijing. We also got some useful contacts.

We went back to the Expo today to talk to the people at the Malmö booth again We decided that me and Kristofer are going to work in the booth once a week and provide some information on green roofs to the Expo visitors. We also discussed the possibility of me and Kristofer organizing a workshop with Chinese students on the subject of green roofs. We even managed to get workpasses to the Expo so we wont have to pay for every visit.

An interesting coincidence is that there is a roof garden accessible from the building we live in, and visible from our apartment are several buildings with green roofs. We are planning to go to some of these buildings to see if we can get access to the roofs and maybe some information on the roofs.

We believe we have had a good start to our project here Shanghai and we feel we are headed of in the right direction. It will be interesting to see what our initial contacts can lead to, and we still have a few possibilities left to explore, so we think we have good chances of getting useful information.

We have had some trouble uploading pictures here on the blog, but it seems to work better now so we will try to upload some of the pictures we have taken so far.

A very muggy, sweaty, cheerful greeting from us here in Shanghai, China!