On a whim (back in May), I purchased some round trip tickets from San Francisco to Hong Kong via Vancouver on Air Canada. The all in price was US$600 which is a real bargain!
It’s one hell of a positioning flight but it put me within 2.5 hours of Shanghai and the Expo. I cashed in miles for a Business Class roundtrip on Dragonair. Due to a really tight schedule, I spent a total of 8 days away from my house which meant only 3 days in Shanghai, which were filled with debauchery, closing bars and getting back late late.
But more about the nightlife later. On the last full day in Shanghai, I visited the Expo. If I could take one memory back from the Expo, it would be queues. Lots and lots queues. All of them shared one thing; that they were really looooong!
So instead of showing you boring pictures of a never-ending queue, I’ll instead show you some pix of the Expo at night.
It’s deceptively large. That means that you can see it from everywhere and it looks kinda big. Then when you are next to it, you realize it’s REALLY big.
The China pavilion will be one of the permanent structures of this Expo; it dominates the Expo and is located smack in the middle of the Expo site.
As you move away from the China pavilion, the rest of the regions of the world present themselves. You walk through Europe then Latin America. Here you can see the Brazil pavilion with what is supposed to be a soccer game but is actually a Windoze error message on the jumbotron. Embarrassing! For Microsoft…
Asia Pacific was represented at the Shanghai Expo.
Of course, if you survive the 25 minute trudge from the China pavilion, you will reach the last zone, the Americas. The Canada pavilion actually looked the best; the US pavilion looked like a big advert. Also, no VIP entrance for US passport holders. So no visit.
Since it was late when we finally got there, we got to do a quick tour through the Expo, only stopping off in countries that didn’t have a queue. All the ones above, save North Korea’s had huge queues so we couldn’t visit. The next Expo is in 10 years. Will plan better then!
