The whole city is a-buzz over it. People from all over the country - in fact, the world - are coming to Shanghai to experience this event. I was excited too, after seeing so many advertisements & hearing so many people talk about it.
For 160 RMB (about US $23) I got an all-day ticket. I had heard about the long lines for some of the countries' pavilions - it was rumored that you had to wait four hours to enter the Japan & South Korea pavilions - so I decided to try to see as many of the smaller, less popular pavilions as I could. I'll go back another time to see the rest.
In the six hours that I spent at the Expo, I wound up seeing about 15 of the pavilions with little or no wait. Some were bigger than others, but they all had interesting displays showing something of their culture, traditions, food, &/or technology.
At the Maldives pavilion, they had a sand pit & some palm trees for photo taking. You could get a henna tatoo at the Bangladesh pavilion. The Mongolia pavilion had a display on dinosaurs. Timor Leste had some really cool wood carvings. At the Iranian pavilion they were selling beautiful rugs at too high a price for anyone to consider buying them. In the Vietnam pavilion there were musicians playing traditional Vietnamese instruments. The Turkmenistan pavilion had several mannequins wearing traditional Turkmenistan-ese clothing. & Kyrgyzstan showed us what living in a yurt would be like.
The coolest pavilion I saw was the Morocco one. They had three floors in a beautiful building that looked like a Moroccan palace. Their displays were museum quality & they had several videos explaining everything from making pottery to the different spices available in the country to the modern day fashion scene.
Still, there was just a five-minute wait for the Moroccan pavilion. But when I asked at the Japan line, they told me it was a four-hour wait, & you had to wait seven hours to get into the Saudi Arabia pavilion! I wonder what makes those pavilions so much cooler than the ones that I saw - because the ones I saw were pretty cool. I guess I'll have to go back to find out - & I'll be sure to bring a book.
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