World Expo of Queues

As I write this, I’m actually in Tokyo, but before I delve into things here, I wanted to talk about Shanghai.

The purpose of the Shanghai stop was pretty much exclusively to see Expo 2010. See it, I did. See pavilions? I saw some.

Why only some?

The queues.

Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there would be nasty queues at a major global event hosted by a country over a billion people, but it certainly did to me.

Everything had massive queues attached to it. Even the most obscure country’s pavilion that you’d think close to no one (at least in China) would have any interest in visiting had at least a 20 minute minimum wait.

I wish I was exaggerating for effect, but I waited 20-40 minutes to get inside the following pavilions:

- The Caribbean Community (which apparently now includes Guyana & Suriname)

- Kyrgyzstan

- Cuba (which was a bit of a letdown…architecturally stunning on the outside with a beautiful mural of Havana inside, but basically was a shabby stand selling rum and cigars on the inside)

- Slovenia (“I Feel sLOVEnia” is a brilliant slogan, and the wittiest one I saw…in English.)

- Myanmar (Everything’s peachy keen in Myanmar apparently.)

- Timor-Leste/East Timor (I saw everyone walking about with Timor-Leste bags, yet I couldn’t find a single shop at the pavilion.)

- Peru (A trippy journey up a metaphorical Macchu Picchu, and into a Peruvian restaurant.)

It was over an hour’s wait to get into these:

- North Korea (Quite frankly, there was no way that I was going to pass that opportunity, and North Korea had propaganda by the tonne on sale, yet all everybody wanted to buy were stamps and purified water.)

- South Africa (I’d like to cut the South Africans some slack since they did practically blow the national budget on the World Cup, but it was letdown after the exterior featured a very rousing quote by Nelson Mandela. Honestly, close to no mention about being a “rainbow nation?”)

- Venezuela (Full of rhetoric, but extremely moving Socialist rhetoric about equality and striving to improve economic disparity between the races. Coincidentally (or not), it was located next to the Cuban pavilion. The spirit of Chavezism took hold of me and I proceeded to order some empanadas from the staff at the pavilion’s restaurant in Spanish. The Chinese staff stared at me blankly in response.)

- Australia (“Come visit/invest in Australia! We’ve got natural resources galore and a multiethnic population the size of Shanghai.” That was the message I took away from the flashy Mandarin—subtitled in English—film at the Australian Pavilion. Mind you, the Australian Pavilion seemed to be staffed exclusively by Euro-Australians fluent in Mandarin.)

With those sort of waiting times, I didn’t even bother attempting to visit these pavilions:

- The USA (Although for once the US was making a serious effort at a World Expo. Apparently, Congress passed some law that forbids the US government from using money to do a pavilion, so our piss-poor previous efforts are the fault of corporate America being cheap. Amongst the sponsors this time around? Amway. I kid you not.)

- Iraq (located as far away from Iran as they possibly make it.)

- Kazakhstan/Uzbekistan (and every other -stan out there, save for Kyrgyzstan)

- The Netherlands (which was entitled “Happy Street,” and scene of some of the most vicious queuing behaviour I saw.)

- China/Hong Kong/Macau/Taiwan (As much as I wanted to see any potential friction going down “One Country, Three Systems” street, I was not going to wait 4 hours in the sun for it.

Architecturally, this was an amazing event. Truly it was, I really will be keen to see what Shanghai will do with the pavilions after the event ends on Halloween.

As a visitor, however, this Expo left me feeling a little bit left out. For the most part, the pavilions were more about selling the country to the Chinese as opposed to the world at large. While China may be making millionaires by the second, it still somewhat contravenes the purpose of a World Expo--at least to my eyes--to heavily cater to one crowd as opposed to the world at large. Ironically, the organisers seemed to be selling the Expo to foreign visitors as a way to meet China and the World.

I think something got lost in translation.

It’ll be interesting to see what Yeosu (Korea) has in store for 2012.