world expo

let's talk strategy: you want to go to the world expo and see as many pavilions as possible. you also want to avoid being trampled by the average 400,000 people that visit a day. 怎么办？what to do?!

i give classmate john bryan props for picking this sunday to go. chinese high school students took their SAT equivalent this weekend, and chinese university students had make-up classes because of the holiday on wednesday (yes, holidays here aren't actually holidays at all). best of all, it was overcast and lightly drizzling. john truly had a recipe for success! we were only joined by 333,000 other expo-goers.

the expo hype has basically given way to horror stories about the crowds and heat. sarah, john, michael and i were so lucky to experience none of these problems! between 3-9 pm, we visited 8 different pavilions and walked all over the park. we started with the practically empty ones: north korea, iran, lebanon. worked our way up to some more popular ones: india, new zealand. and finally some big tickets: singapore and canada.

SINGAPORE WAS MY FAVORITE. i know... predictable. but i loved singapore so dearly and i'm totally susceptible to propaganda when it comes to this dazzling [authoritarian] city state. the theme of the pavilion is "music and harmony," symbolizing singapore's success in harnessing its diversity. it's shaped like a boom box and the activities on the ground floor are all musical.

as you walk up the stairs, you can glance at cool graphics and statistics about singapore's insane GDP growth since 1970. upstairs, you watch this amazing music video in a circular room where you're completely surrounded by the screen (i freaked out, overstimulation really affects me). finally, the rooftop is a stunning orchid garden that plays the most tranquil music you have ever heard. wahhh take me back there!

ah yes, obviously there's plenty of closed caption video monitoring too. smile for singapore!!!

our last stop of the night was canada. sarah and i are both huge canada fans, seeing as i was practically raised there and she lives 3 hours across the border in new hampshire. the activities in the canada pavilion were cray-zaaaay. there are bikes surrounded by LED screens, and the faster you pedal on them, the faster you "fly." there is also a motion-sensitive pool-projector thing where you can draw in the water.

we treated ourselves to genuine poutine fries for dinner! i even did as the chinese tourist do, and took a picture with a real, live canadian. it was great.

anyway, i'll finish off with a picture of the park and the lupu bridge from on top of a pavilion. the boys noted that lupu strongly resembles mariokart's rainbow racetrack on the good old nintendo 64.... good call. and a good day!