The closest we could come to describing the Expo is Disneyland Lite. It’s a very strange mix of elaborate and sometimes quirky permanent construction such as our hotel with its rain forest atrium and funny lightswitches, a carnival featuring an array of extremely large rides, and a number of areas patterned after famous cities in the world such as Venice and Rotterdam and some places not so specifically identified such as Pirate’s Walk. The Venice and Rotterdam areas feature multi-story buildings constructed in the style of their namesake cities, with shops and the like on the ground floor, and spaces above that appear to be intended for use as apartments after the Expo closes. A few seemed to be already occupied, but most were still hollow. Rotterdam forms a boundary of the carnival area, and Venice is indeed constructed with canals, not streets, but it’s laid out in a grid pattern quite different from the meandering geography of the real place. Pirate’s Walk is a collection of the typical buildings one might encounter in an old port city.
Here is a shot from our hotel window, one of Pirate’s Walk with the hotel in the background, and a couple of shots of Venice, along with a video of the Rotterdam carnival area.
Unfortunately, with the Expo due to close in a week, almost all the inhabitants of the lower floor shopfronts had already packed up and gone home. We could see from the leftover signs that many were official cultural and tourism representatives of countries from around the world, while others were independent merchants. The merchants who remained, largely Indian and Nepali, were unloading their wares at firesale prices and relentless in their bargaining.
There were also a few restaurants remaining open for trade. The greeter at one of them suggested strongly to us that it was a real Chinese restaurant and we probably wouldn’t enjoy it, so we took him at his word and settled for Indian.
So, other than naps our day consisted of wandering through all of this, purchasing an occasional souvenir, contemplating which scary ride to take at the carnival only to find that almost all the ticket booths seemed to be closed, and those that weren’t were too far away. It was a strange day, but one that didn’t require too much thought or daring and so was well suited to our physical and mental state at the time.
Then came supper. We had enjoyed the breakfast buffet at the semi-Western style restaurant in the hotel (see Monday’s blog for more detail), so we decided to try it for dinner. Figured that their bilingual signs and reasonable understanding of Western eating preferences would make for a pleasant and low tension meal. This turned out not to be so. After about three rounds of inspecting the offerings, Sue settled on bread, rice, and beer. Bruce was more adventurous, trying the pork, prawn, and frog. Bone to meat ratio in the chopped up pork hunks was the best of the three at perhaps 40:60, though the meat itself was tasty. As for the frog, also tasty, the ratio swung toward something more like 90:10. As for the prawn, debris outnumbered edible by maybe 20 to 1. The beer was tasty.
We walked off the meal with another wander over toward the carnival, now brightly lit up. The stone pavement was soaking wet, but we were certain that it hadn’t rained. Then we saw the night cleanup crew, hosing down the area with high pressure water pumped from a nearby Venetian canal and scrubbed toward the drains by a barefooted crew of people wielding brooms made out of twigs. Sue’s and my thoughts both returned to the early morning street sweeping scene of Paris in the 1960s, though when we returned there in the early 80s the twigs had been replaced with plastic replicas.
By the end of the day we were all feeling rather closed in, and in an unreal place that just had to be different from what lay outside in the real world. Tomorrow we’re going to start discovering that world.
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