Shanghai Expo, here we come!

In the old days, World’s Fairs were exciting events. When I was ten, I was thrilled when my family took me to New York City (my first visit there!) to see the World’s Fair. The highlights: the Unisphere and “It’s a Small World” – a boat ride past animatronic children of the world moving stiffly to the tune of that famous song in many languages. Perhaps my worldview started from there.

In 1963, my husband, Paul, visited Seattle for the first time, for the World’s Fair that left Seattle with its most famous landmark: the Space Needle.

This year, 2010, the spotlight shifts to Shanghai. Tomorrow, Paul and I leave for Shanghai, where we will visit Expo 2010. It is really a world’s fair, but those words are out of fashion now. Pavilions from nearly 200 countries dot the Expo site, on two sides of Shanghai’s Huangpu River. (The site alone is twice the size of Monaco.)

Each country is vying with others not to win gold medals but to wow visitors with cooler-than-thou structures, designed to showcase their distinct cultures. China Daily calls these pavilions “cutting edge architecture.” The Economist calls them “bizarre architectural follies.”

The biggest is China’s pavilion, which resembles an ancient imperial crown, or an inverted red pyramid (see picture above). Japan’s exhibit boasts of robots playing violins. The British pavilion, the “Seed Cathedral,” has been described as a “shimmering cube of rods.” (What’s that?)

The U.S. exhibit includes photos of the faces of more than 10,000 Americans of Chinese descent – including Paul and Emily Yang! Also, bilingual “student ambassadors” – American students who speak Chinese. Yea!

Personally, I’m eager to see Belgium’s exhibit, which includes a complete chocolate factory.

The Expo has been super-expensive. Shanghai says it spent $4.2 billion on the event alone – more than twice the price tag of the Beijing 2008 Olympics! Plus, Shanghai spent plus tens of billions to speed up improvements to the city’s infrastructure. Perhaps that accounts for the higher cost estimate I’ve read: $58 billion. What’s an extra ten billion, here and there?

Shanghai Expo expects 70 million visitors, 95 percent of them Chinese, over the six months from May to October. Recently, it has averaged 400,000 visitors per day. Everyone I know who has visited the Expo says the crowds are terrible. Hmmm. I hate crowds. So I wonder, will it be worth it?

As long as I don’t have to meet Expo’s annoying square blue mascot, a Gumby-like creature called Haibao, which means "Shanghai Darling."

Any advice for a visitor to Shanghai Expo?