Had the privilege to get a free ticket to see the Shanghai Expo yesterday. after reading about it on various other blogs and several hours of watching the Expo tv channel in hotels in Shanghai, I could not resist but to see it for myself. Summary of the day: it well worth it if you have a free ticket and a spare day, but don’t expect to see much from the inside … too many long queues and too much to see.
Entered the Expo on the Puxi side of the river, where the queues were very short and it only too us about 7 minutes to get through the security checks. A little like at the airport, you were expected to go through a metal detector and your bags were scanned. A very nice lady then thanked you for your cooperation … hmmmm. The same friendliness was no where to be found when we then made our way to the river side to cross over to the Pudong side (the interesting side with all the country pavilions) by boat. There were hordes of people all with the same idea as ours … and christ were they adamant not to miss their spot on the boat. Despite signs and continuous messages droning through the loudspeakers, pushing, shoving and shouting was very much order of the day … not good! I guess it could have been the funny chinglish that made them so agitated … or perhaps it was just the fact that they were about to cross over to the good side.
Anyway, finally there we headed straight for the China pavilion fully aware that we had no hope in hell to even enter the thing. But simply seeing it from the outside was enough. A magnificent structure which, I am sure, will be well worth the visit again when the Expo is over. Then passed by the New Zealand pavilion where there was almost no queue and marveled at the tree ferns and Maori sculptures. Since you need id to enter the Expo site, and this usually being a passport if you are a foreigner, we were able to jump the queues of several pavilions and go inside to have a look. Being the multi cultural group that we were, we managed to get into the British pavilion, the German pavilion and the Brazilian pavilion. Being fully biased and happily admitting to it, I must say that I preferred the Germany pavilion. It had the best decorations and the best exhibits of all the pavilions that we saw. Also stopped by the Tunisian pavilion and the Luxembourg pavilion.
All this might sound like it too us just a few hours, but by the time we exited the German pavilion, it was time to head to the ferry again and get on the bus to drive back to Ningbo. If you asked me whether it was worth going: yes. If you’d ask me whether it’d be worth going again: no. We saw all of the main attractions (some from the inside, most from the outside), the pavilions themselves are quite cool architecture wise, but not majorly interesting from inside and if you really wanted to see everything … you’d need at least a month! And by that time I’d be driven completely mad by all the queueing.
One Response to “Shanghai Expo”
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Thanks Frauke for your feedback on the Shanghai Expo that I finally won’t see…