Expo in Shanghai (2010)

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Last Saturday the Athletics Diamond League was in Shanghai. I was in Shanghai in 2010 for another event that usually determines the destination of my holidays: Expo. It was my third Expo after Hannover 2000 and Zaragoza 2008; I would go to Milan 2015, while I skipped the 2012 edition, somewhere in Korea and I think I'll miss it this year in Kazakhstan.

I have to say that in Shanghai I did not feel like a "common spectator", indeed I felt like a celebrity. Indeed, the celebrities were my children (then six and a half years old and a little less than five), who attracted the attention of so many Chinese who had never seen a Western child before. Particularly my daughter had an exotic appeal: her curly hair. I was thinking that I also went there to see a world where the exotic were us, but I thought of the European pavilions, not of us personally.

The low presence of Westerners (one met more of them in 15 minutes at McDonald's at the end of the day than all day long at Expo) also involved language problems: it was difficult to find people who spoke English, much more than in the city of  Shanghai. However, I also met two Italian speaking people: a cook at a restaurant who had worked in Italy, and a girl from the Belarusian pavilion, who had been studying in our country.

The Shanghai Expo was the biggest ever: 5 times the Milan one. It would have taken weeks to visit it all, especially considering that some pavilions would have taken a full day: six hours of queuing (for a thematic oil pavilion) were also reported. Having 4 days available, choices had to be made, discarding all the halls with too long queues or too far away, so practically all those of the larger biggest countries: China (I have never seen the pavilion of the host country, in any Expo) , USA, Germany, France, or even the Chinese provinces. The only Chinese territory whose stand I saw was Macau: rich in special effects, celebrating the 20 million tourists/day per year of the territory, but never mentioning the reason why at least 19.5 million of them go there, namely gambling. There are lots of "removals" like this in Expos.

With two kids, sometimes you got to jump the queue: it was the case of Spain, where they were very kind. Very beautiful pavilion, showing the whole country, from religious processions to gay marriage. I'm afraid of confusing with other Expos, but among the most interesting pavilions I thought Morocco (that's always nice, I'm not wrong for sure), , New Zealand, Mexico and Indonesia. At the Italian pavilion, I hoped that they would let me jump the queue either as Italian or because of the children, but they did neither. There was something impressive, but no pavilion was so outrightly commercial, full of brand references. I only saw another pavilion, Portugal, where a company was named, but with far less emphasis than in our one. Many politicians were also named: this was already a bit more common, but only in third world pavilions (or sure not in G20 countries). I felt the same annoyance towards the common spectator I had noticed at the World Swimming Championships in Rome the year before. In short, we always get recognized.