The time: 6:45 am; Place: Shanghai taxi; Feeling: very hung-over and miserable; Destination: 2010 World Expo

    Flash back to two nights ago when the Queens team had all gotten together to hang out at this awesome local bar called Helen’s, aprox. 5 min walking distance from the residence. Helen’s is a multipurpose venue  where you can eat breakfast, lunch and dinner, study and when your all studied out you can just hang out with friends, smoke some Hookah and drink some very weak Chinese beer... over all a very good time.  Needless to say we all had a very good/ late night even though we had all planned to go to the World Expo at 6:45 in the morning.

   
Flash forward to the cab ride where Erika, Meg and I are napping through a 2 hour traffic jam... not fun! Any way we arrived at the Expo only to be greeted with the longest line up I have ever seen in my life! After about another half hour and being directed like cattle through security we finally arrived inside Shanghais World Expo.  We met up with the rest of the crew and headed straight to India as our first stop in Expo Land.  The highlight of this pavilion was definitely our Indian breakfast of Naan and curried chicken and of course I can’t forget the Chinese paparazzo. As soon as we sat down to eat a group of men with Nikon cameras formulated at the restaurant doors and began just snap, snap, snapping away (what every girl loves, having their photo taken, while hung over at 9am, eating Indian ... definitely my idea of classy!). 

From there we headed off to meet our German and Dutch friends Simon and Max. They work at the expo in the German pavilion. This turned out to be the best thing because they got us VIP access to a tone of Pavilions allowing us to skip the 6 hour line ups.

In total I was able to see Germany, The Urban Planning Pavilion, Uruguay, Chile, Nepal, India, Greece, Honduras, Mexico, Argentina, Costa Rica, and of course we can`t forget CANADA! All things considered I think we did pretty well for ourselves in one day.

Now there are some things I wish to point out about this expo:

1) Crowd control was impeccable! I did not expect everything to be so organised with the amount of people that were in the expo site. Lines were air-conditioned with fans that would spray mist every minute and also came equipped with built in side benches.  The washrooms, although they were squatters were very clean and equipped with toilet paper made from recycled cardboard. They also had sanitation stations where you could wash your hands with soap (a very nice change)! Finally, every 30 yards or so they would have a rest station with benches,  the same misty fans from the line ups and water stations, where free filtered water was accessible. Over all a very pleasant experience!

2) The theme of the Expo is Better City Better Life with specific attention on ecological and environmental advances in order to build more sustainable and environmentally friendly cities. With this in mind, most of the pavilions I saw did offer some sort of expression of this Idea, however I did notice that a lot of the smaller pavilions used this opportunity to basically promote their tourism for their country. Also though the theme of the expo supports environmental ideas and advances, the expo itself, ironically, is a complete contradiction.  With all the money, man power and effort put into building the site, relocating the residence that formally inhabited the area, along the amount of energy used to run it all, I would argue that it seems to be a huge waste to tear it all down in a matter of months. Although some pavilions are remaining, I just find it very ironic and contradicting that theme of a Better City, Better Life is completely being disregarded by having an Expo this large to begin with. Any way that was my DEVS rant for this post, now back onto the fun stuff!

3) Canada was AWESOME! We of course got to skip the line, not because we had our Canadian passports and not because we stood as a group to sing our national anthem, ( I know kinda lame, but how often do you get to sing your national anthem in a different country! ) but simply because CANADIANS ARE THE BEST!!!!  I also had waffles and maple syrup topped off with a moose head, so obviously I had a great time.

4) The German pavilion only had very very! Attractive volunteers... I know I`m generalizing but I really want to visit Germany now.

5) Finally and of course I`m saving the best for last...... DRUM ROLE IF YOU PLEASE!

 I STOLE A PANEL FROM THE WALL OF THE LATVIAN PAVILION!!!!!  I know, I know, it`s bad! But if you had been there you all would have been very impressed at how stealthy I was!

Latvian Pavilion (I stole the pink panel)

All in all I ended up having an amazing day! The Pavilions were all beautiful and some of the ideas for the future were very interesting. I look forward to seeing if any of them are actually going to be implemented some day.