A Glimpse of the World

After lounging around in our fab hotel room for a few hours, we finally muster up the courage to head to the World Expo - leveraging the free ferry service.  Of course, I didn't realize just how slow the free ferry service would be, since it took us well over an hour to get there (vs 15 mins by taxi).  But the views were beautiful and it was a very relaxing journey.

As I posted in FB, the Shanghai World Expo = the World Showcase at Epcot in Disney World x 100, with 450,000 of your closest Chinese friends in 95 degree heat.  And NO concept of "my personal space bubble", as my 12 year old daughter calls it.

When we finally got in around 7 pm, we noticed the line at the Japan pavilion was 3 hours.  This did not bode well for the rest of our visit.

We decided to focus on the Axis of Evil and other small but interesting countries' pavilions - countries that we were unlikely to ever visit in real life.

Our final list across 2 days at the Expo included such perennial faves as Libya, Iran, North Korea, Iraq, Angola, Yemen, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Mongolia, Nepal, Vietnam, all the Chinese provinces and our personal favorite, Lithuania (where hubby enjoyed Lithuanian draft beer and we had some unmemorable Lithuanian delicacies).

 

The kids got their little Expo passport stamped at all these countries, which makes for a nice souvenir.