The Danes had really pulled out all the stops, they brought the Mermaid. Yup, the iconic Hans Christian Anderson Copenhagen harbour statue, biggest tourist attraction in Denmark, and they brought it to Shanghai. Awesome.
The whole pavilion was white and beautiful and the water was also brought over with the mermaid from Denmark - how cool is that? (It was in contrast to the Chileans who were masquerading Chinese soil as their own as China wouldn't let them bring Chilean soil..for whatever reason)
There were bikes you could ride all the way up and a curving bench with wiggles and loops in it the whole way up too.
And a fountain on the roof.
- The aggressive photographer was a constant feature of the weekend. At one point in Canada it almost got nasty when a few middle aged men with massive zooms wouldn't go away. I can see why famous people flip out at paparazzi. -
The whole pavilion was awesome though, aside from the bizarre smell. Which we later found out was from the industrial amounts of white paint they had to apply every night to keep the whole thing looking clean and white.
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Probably the cheesiest pavilion we went to was Russia, which despite being minimalist and stylish on the outside was decorated like Pandora/Fern Gully on the inside. We made it in thanks to bumping into a pair of Nanda guys who had nicked a friends work pass, the queue was massive, who doesn't want to be in Avatar?
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Cheesiness was fairly prevalent though, North Korea (I went to North Korea!!! sort of.) coming in a close second with 'The peoples paradise' which involved rainbows and a fountain full of naked and surprisingly well detailed children holding a dove, representing peace obviously...
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The prize for full on weirdness definitely goes to Spain though. It involved a dancer, a ceiling covered in bones and a GIANT ANIMATRONIC BABY.
Two storeys of baby (if you look there's a little person by the baby's right hand -that's how big it was). It moved and grinned and looked old and young at the same time, they really didn't need the barrier, no one wanted to go near it anyways.
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The lovely Helga got a full ten of us into Iceland simply by being Icelandic. Iceland had definitely struggled with the Expo thing, as Helga explained 'Yeah, it's a bit crap, we don't have money for this kind of thing'. The whole show was a big empty room with cliched roving shots of Iceland projected onto all four walls. It was however massively popular with the Chinese, for a very simple reason - they were capitalising on the Chinese interest in the ash cloud.
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MOUNTIE!
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Bit of a fail in Tunisia where the fountain that was probably supposed to show the whole world coming together and appreciating Tunisian culture simply looked like a 'How to' missile bomb Tunisia from all over the world.
KABOOOM!
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Angola had diamonds on display, plenty of Chinese people seemed to be getting pretty excited to see 'real' diamonds. Beth and I were less easily fooled.
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As at Uni. as at Expo. I think Algeria has a problem with it's bins being nicked.
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Lots of ice-cream at the bottom of the China pavilion - which was impressive on the outside (the European designed bit) and crap on the inside (the Chinese designed bit).
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And one of my favorite little finds of the trip. A roomful of soldiers dedicatedly practising
'On your left'
'Go straight forward'
'Take the next right turn'
With arm signals and in perfect unison.
xx
(Here actually has sensible pictures of the Expo - I really want people to be as excited about it as I was...)
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