Travelled on the last week of May, 2010
DAY 1
I was excited to look at the expo since we were so confident that maybe there weren't a lot of people crowding in since we arrived on the last week of May. To our surprise the place was jam packed with locals, it was like a swarm of ants trying to get in the expo with a lot of narrow gates for access. Once we got in, we went first to the countries which weren't visited by the locals like iran & north korea. We then saw the Chinese pavilion from a distance but once we got there the place was again jammed by the locals. We proceeded to the Asian zones where it wasn't that congested and we finally started going into some pavilions (Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, Morocco).
We then proceeded to the European zones but still it was so crowded with the locals. We only visited Portugal and French pavilions and they weren't that quite exciting to look at. We stayed for the whole day walking the kilometer long Expo park and even though it was raining the park still showed some interesting sights. We stayed long enough till night and caught glimpses of the lighting of the buildings inside the expo. It was quite the sight seeing so many unusual and huge building lighting up the expo as we prepared for another round of the expo tomorrow. We promised ourselves that we would really wake up early so that we can make it in order to get inside the Chinese pavilion.
DAY 2
We woke up early enough to arrive at the expo at around 6am. To our surprise again, these locals showed a "no retreat, no surrender" attitude since we saw others camping outside. We realized that we really can't beat the chinese will power so we waited again until we were to be let in. Once we were in, we went straight to the European zone since we thought all of them would hoard over the chinese pavilion but what we saw was another surprise. The whole expo was swarming with the local chinese people, it was like a everybody from the farms and mountains all accumulated inside the Shanghai Expo. We were only able to go inside the Russian pavilion and after that we tried going into the other European pavilions but we just gave immediately as we saw one of China's greatest assets, it's population. This was just one zone, an announcement was made that the kilometer long expo area was as crowded as this one so it really was a morale crushing feeling for us.
We decided to spend the rest of the day walking around the expo and we told ourselves that we aren't coming back here tomorrow since we planned to go around the expo for 3 days. We have now realized how rich the Chinese people are since most of them came from provinces I never even heard of. Next time an event as big as this comes up again we will go on the 1st week of the month to avoid the crowd.
