The Expo (II)

* United Kingdom
* Norway
* Canada
* Chile
* Saudi Arabia

I also visited, like, the Cisco pavilion XD and a whole bunch of the thematic Future Of Eco-Urbanism etc type things (most of the pavilions I visited, including the national ones, took the theme pretty seriously, although it was sometimes pastede on in terms of branding). The Cities of the Future pavilion is a converted generating station on the east side of the river, with a fascinating hundred-year history in its own right, that one read off wall plaques in the queue. The main smokestack was converted into a giant thermometer. I'm not sure what they intend to do with the rest of the space after the Expo, but the exhibits are all massive light displays and ten-metre-tall animated video projections and techno music; the place has the acoustic makings of an insane nightclub. XD;

The European pavilions tend toward airy whimsical treatments. Romania is an exploded green crystal apple, the Netherlands are a complex of stairs and open rooms on stilts topped with a yellow tulip, like something that might sit on a public beach in a resort town. Denmark is a blue and white spiral top that one climbs up and cycles down... After I wrote yesterday that Korea's pavilion felt like the stuff of cyberspace I realized that observation was more broadly applicable: if there is one thing these ingenious, intentionally impermanent constructs all lined up in a row don't read as, it's real buildings. They are entirely semiotics. Switzerland is wire netting supported with internal concrete vessels, studded with thousands of red plastic blood corpuscules that turn solar energy into sparkle. To think that they could have hung it over with a buttzillion folding pocket knives...! The funny thing is, I always assumed that cinema-friendly, Neuromancer lineage of cyberspace visualization - entities macro-represented by distinct symbolic blocks that one could explode or drill down into - was deprecated from the first, because the real Internet (or appspace, or whatever) has never felt anything like it. But here it is in the flesh of architecture as it were. Coca-Cola: red neon, Cisco: a pearly white logo-ed block.

The British pavilion is really lovely, science fiction by way of modern art (I had a sense that there was griping about it from the home front, but well, should've expected that XDD). It's sort of... a grey cube made out of metal and plexiglass spikes that wave in the wind? Like a blown-up sea protozoan. And then when you go inside it's like the TARDIS room where seed samples sleep suspended in crystal. And then you go outside again and sit on gently rolling hills of grey and rust red astroturf, and watch Shakespeare. (This last must be a rotating attraction: a couple of days ago when I walked past it was photos with the Beckham waxwork from Madame Tussaud's).

Norway had a folk pop band out front to entertain the queue, which I wish more pavilions had thought of. It was MADE OUT OF TREES (any country that had trees made their pavilion out of trees). The Canadian one was - the Cirque and the NFB were tapped to provide the experiential component - and best of all there was no queuing for passport holders. XDD Chile gets full points not only for 1) having no queue and 2) being MADE OUT OF TREES but for having the best bar, at which I met a delegation from DFAIT/Industry Canada, dying what does it say that Canadians hear the siren call of the 25RMB pisco sour and gravitate unerringly over miles.

Queuing times run on hype and rumour, like a music festival. I waited for two hours in an immobile line for Japan (a lavender silkworm robot pokemon) before thinking better of it, and the Japanese Industry pavilion was similarly backed up ("I hear it's got the world's most advanced toilet. Fifteen years ahead of anything you've ever seen!"). Yesterday afternoon, though, I actually decided to queue for Saudi Arabia - the hottest ticket in town - after getting a tipoff that the shortest wait time was at 4:30 (it reaches 7-8 hours earlier in the day, no joke), and basically as a sort of trophy, like you can't say you've had the full Shanghai Expo experience unless you've done a five-hour queue. There were mutterings that the Saudis had engineered the hype, which I actually believe, because when I got in there at 9:30 I realized the queuing was an integral part of the experience, maybe the experience. Because the thing itself is a massive walk/escalator that spirals to the top and then spirals to the bottom. orz I, I see what you did thar, guys. Good job on sneaking that under the government's radar providing a miniature packaged version of a distinctive cultural experience. Anyway, if you think about it, if there's one thing the Saudis presumably know how to do, it's build a mothereffing pavilion.