We got to the Expo 2010 site a bit later than we had hoped for and found ourselves in a line up to get into the site. In case you are wondering, this is the second holding stage and we had one more yet to go before going through security and then onto the site itself. Needless to say, the crowd inspired many to take photos and video of the “waiting in line” part of Expo.
We got to visit quite a few pavilions which was a surprise considering the numbers of people on the grounds, a crowd easily around 400,000 people. The site recently set a record number of one day visits at 630,000 people. We did get into various Central America and South America pavilions as well as African pavilions. Of course we had to also go into the Ukrainian pavilion.
This is the best we could do as far as the Canadian pavilion was concerned. The lineup was between two and four hours of waiting time. The same was true of Australia, France, Italy, New Zealand and a bunch of other European countries. The Asian countries had line up of four to six hours in length. Even though the lineups were huge at so many pavilions, we did find enough to see without major lineups. Of course we took time out to eat pizza at “Papa John’s” during the afternoon.
There is no question that the Chinese pavilion dominated the site. Since the pavilion will remain long after Expo is finished, we hope to get to see it up close and personal at a different time.
As we made our way back to Changzhou we ran into a snag. We assumed that the return G train would leave from a new train station near Hongqiao airport as that is the main base for all G trains, trains that travel at more than 300 kilometres per hour. We found out when we got to the train station that for our return, the train was leaving from the main Shanghai station. Of course it was too late to make the cross-city journey in order to catch the train so we booked another train to get back – a “K” train, the slowest in the fleet of trains. Instead of an hour train ride, we would take almost three hours to get to Changzhou. And, there were no seats left on that train so we would have to travel standing room only. Now that was an experience.
Sounds like quite a day.