Into Every Life, A Little Rain Must Fall

Part of the travel experience is learning how to deal with a crisis, right? Actually, much of the travel experience could be considered crisis, in varying levels, and usually manageable.

Today, the meter tipped from "adventuresome" to "hassle-filled" when Maggie's purse was lifted during a visit to a bazaar in Old Town Shanghai.

Unfortunately, it not only contained her spending money and critical ipod and headphones, but also my I-phone. We spent the next few hours getting cozy with the local security officials. It was a little eerie finding out that they had video footage of nearly every inch of the place, as we endlessly watched playbacks to try to discover whether the purse was retrievable. There's Maggie walking with the purse visible...then a few moments later, it's gone. Somewhere in the blind spot on the cameras, it vanished.

After we took a deep breath, and suspended my phone and changed all my passwords, we hope there won't be any long-term repercussions as my i-phone makes its way through the black markets of Asia. It could be worse, right?

You can't let something like this ruin your day, and we abandon our more-complicated sightseeing plans and instead spend our last evening in China at our beloved EXPO.

There are no lines, and we wander into a dozen or so pavilions. But first, we have some milk tea with our new/old friends at the Sri Lanka pavilion. They are sorry to hear it's our last visit, and Tenzin promises to try to make a trip there soon.

Here are two of our favories from our last night:

*The Tunisian pavilion has a fountain in the floor where jets of water leap from a giant world map - from New York, London, Johannesburg - all converging on tiny Tunisia.



We love it just as it is, but the Chinese visitors surrounding the fountain are convinced that it is operated by sound, and soon they are all clapping and trying to make it go faster.

*Ever been to Slovenia? Perhaps we need to do a bit more research, but we are seriously considering a trip after we fall in love with their charmingly home-made pavilion (Tenzin says it's like every fourth-grader in the country brought in their school project.) Not that's it's low-tech exactly: it's kind of a light show on the theme of literacy - those are books hanging from the ceiling, and the floor is papered with text, and at every turn of the ramp, there's a photo of some local view of villas in the hills.



The amazonian Slovenians working the exit laugh with us when we tell them how much better it is than the US pavilion! We have to be dragged away.

In spite of all the time we've spent at the EXPO, we are far from seeing all the exhibits. We never manage to get to Iceland, which is reportedly kept at 21 degrees C., though we purchase several of the excessively expensive bottles of chill Icelandic water from the adjacent vending machine. We never get to see Mexico, buried under a man-made, bucolic hill. Norway, which supposedly has a cool I-phone app accompaniment, is always too busy for us. We never make it to the Coca-cola Happiness Factory, for which this kiosk is a mere advertisement.



In the end, though, we are without regrets. It's been a wonderful week.