Shanghai Expo Day 2 – Japan Pavilion

Did you watch the Argentina vs Nigeria game? Oh, Argentina is just brilliant! Everybody’s gotta love Messi. Tim was just trying to educate Rachel today about Messi, when she suddenly turned to him and said “Maisy? Drive bus!” Hahaa,… She’s referring to the famous children’s book series about a mouse called Maisy, and she happened to be reading about Maisy driving a bus recently, so can’t blame her for the confusion. I’m quite certain though that Messi will be too busy to be driving a bus in Argentina or Barcelona.

Sorry for the digression above… World Cup is quite an event for our family.

Anyway, back on Shanghai Expo (which now seem so boring in comparison). Part of the excitement about the Expo is people watching, especially the long queues that form outside highly popular pavilions such as Japan, USA, Italy, Germany etc. Even though the Chinese has had a bad history with the Japanese, when it comes to the Expo, it seems they are willing to put all the bad blood behind them, temporarily. The Chinese are so eager to go into the Japan pavilion that I was told the queue was about 8 hours (Yes, I kid you not!) long when the Expo started initially. The other night when we went, the queue time was down to  3.5 hours. No, we weren’t crazy enough to queue up there, but what caught my attention is the way the security guards were trying to keep the queue crowd in control, and preventing queue cutters from creating havoc there. (As was the case at Germany’s pavilion where a fight broke out between the Germans and Chinese when frustrated Chinese queuers called them Nazis. Ouch!)

You can see here first of all, the crowd is just simply HUGGGEEEE. IT stretches as far out as the eye can see. People bring their portable stools and lots of snacks – totally well prepared for the long wait.

The guards are equally well prepared, complete with poles that acts like make shift gates, much like gates that keep bulls from charging forward in a Spanish bull fighting game. It can only temporarily hold them back, for the moment the gates are thrown open, the crowd charge forward with a pent up vengeance.  Young and old, they all queued up, and waited and waited…. All day long, the guards held their pole, up and down it went, bored to tears.

No, I didn’t queue up, so I can’t really show you what these people will see when they go into the pavilion. It looks pretty ordinary to me from the outside though. I’ll rather go Japan to see for myself what Japan is really about. But for thousands of these Expo goers, many of whom are retired and never left the country, the Expo is the next best thing to traveling round the world. In today’s Internet age, it’s not difficult for us to Google just about anything we want, or book a cheap ticket to go tour some fancy place. But for the majority of Chinese peasants, most never left their village, a small minority left for bigger cities like Beijing or Shanghai, and an even smaller population actually left China to tour other countries. For them, the Expo is a BIG deal. I finally see now why Gary Karwoski find the Expo so compelling that he has never missed one since 1958! That’s 52 years!!!!

Gary is someone we happened to share a table with when we were having our dinner just outside Pakistan’s pavilion. We started chatting and he told us many amazing stories about the past World Expos he has attended. He is working for United Airlines as a steward and thus had the opportunity to come to China regularly. As a small boy, his father brought him to a World Expo in Brussels and thus started his love affair with the event. Gary said the Shanghai World Expo is one  of the best he has attended in recent years. Seeing all the folks here full of energy and passion for the Expo reminded him of the times when he was young and Internet hasn’t yet changed the way people learn about different cultures/countries. I admire him for his passion. To follow an event for 52 long years takes a lot of enthusiasm, energy and planning. All the way Gary!!! Hope to see you again in Shanghai Expo.