Hi, I'm back! Today was a packed day and I'm totally exhausted. We got up early and took the bus to the World Expo. The World Expo has pavillions from almost every country. Some countries, such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, spent extreme amounts of money on their pavillions. It is estimated that Saudi Arabia spent over 142,000,000 U.S. dollars on their pavillion. Other smaller countries, share their pavillion with many other countries in their region and just have small desks. Even some of the pavillions that were extremely small, had lines where you had to wait at least three hours. The China pavillion, for example, requires visitors to camp out overnight to get a ticket that says what time they have to start waiting in line for another nine hours in order to get into the pavillion. This is because, they're starting to give away Expo tickets now. We didn't go inside of any pavillions due to the extremely long lines, but it was still very interesting to see the outside of the different pavillions. We saw the outside of all the pavillions of Asia and the Middle East. After we left the world Expo, I led my mom, dad and a tour friend named Andy through the subways of Shanghai. We went to the pizza place my mom mentioned in the blog yesterday. We had to switch subway trains three times and it was seamless. The subway here is better than any other subway system I have ever taken. O.k...to the pizza. The pizza was great. We had three pizzas made from San Marzano tomatoes from Italy. The owners name is Tony and our waitress was Apple. It's fun to see the English names the Chinese give themselves. Our waitress on the Yangtze River Cruise was named Candy, because she likes candy.

After the fantastic eating experience, we hopped into a taxi and headed for the Shanghai World Financial Center. (SWFC) Before I tell you about the financial center, I want to teach you how to pick a taxi. As you enter the taxi, the taxi driver's license is prominently displayed. A number takes up 80% of the license. The general rule of thumb, is that even though most of the taxi drivers don't speak English, you can find a good one by their number. If their number is less than 200,000, they can usually get you to your destination. If their number is over 200,000, you're in trouble. We found that out on the way home, but I'll get to that in a minute. Back to the SWFC. There are 100 floors with three observation floors - The 94th, 97th and 100th floor. The 94th floor, allows you unobstructed views of the city of Shanghai. The 97th floor is essentially the same, but just higher up. The 100th floor however, has glass windows and a glass floor! My mom, Andy and I thought it was awesome to stand on the glass floor 1,400 feet up. My dad on the other hand, began to mildly hyperventilate, so we didn't stay long. We got him back to the safety of the 97th floor. Ha Ha.

Now I'll talk about the taxi we took back to our hotel from the Financial Center. We were searching and searching for taxis. Finally, we hailed one down and I saw that his number was over 200,000. I told my dad not to get in the taxi, but he did anyways. He said it would be fine. Well, the guy had no idea what we were saying or where to go. He understood the Mandarin I was speaking, but had never heard of the St. Regis Hotel, which is one of the nicest hotels in Shanghai. Luckily, Andy knew where to go, because he had found our hotel from the 100th floor of the SWFC. With intense shotgun driving, he navigated our taxi driver to the hotel safely. The ride was about 25 minutes long and it only cost $2 U.S. Can you believe it?

Tonight we are going to Danielli's, which according to Fodors is the finest Italian Restaurant in Shanghai. The hotel is paying for our dinner, because of our room change. We found out the president of Lativia is in our hotel and that is why we couldn't have our concierge floor room. It doesn't matter though. Our room is still awesome and now we get to have a nice dinner. I'll let you know if it lives up to its reputation in my next blog post. Typhoon Megi looks like it won't hit Hong Kong directly, but it will only be about 150 miles away. If we even make it to Hong Kong, we'll definitely have rain and wind. Stay tuned! Tony