Travelogue, day 6
Remember how I mentioned that the line for the Japanese pavilion can be longer than five hours? Well. Today, a rainy Monday morning in which I had plunked myself down before the Expo gates a full half hour before they opened, it was breezily short. A mere two hours and some. And they played a whole row of taiko drums at every fifteen minute interval.
As I also mentioned, the Japanese pavilion resembles nothing so much as a gigantic pink sea creature, rising from the abyss to grace the Expo with its bloated, sedate presence. Two hours later, that is still by far the most remarkable thing about it. Its interior is, I suppose, fascinating if you happen to be Chinese and have this very complex relationship with the Japanese, not dissimilar to the feeling you might harbor toward your beloved cat moments after she'd sunk her curving claws a full inch into the delicate spot beneath your ankle. There's a sense of obligation, care and wary respect there, but also a fierce and entirely justified desire to kick across the room. The Japanese, in the meantime, just don't seem to care all that much beyond putting down their enormous pink Japan-was-here sign at the heart of Shanghai and sniggering politely behind their paper fans as they watch the Chinese line up to gawk at girls wearing strange hats and muttering the occasional robotic "konichiwa". Although the violin-playing robot was very nice.
One foiled attempt at delicious sushi later, I had decided to put my life on the line today and had lined up in front of the other enormously popular pavilion in the Asia section, the South Korea pavilion. Two more hours to the beat of incessant drumming. Like the Japanese, the Koreans are all batshit insane; unlike them, their attitude toward China is more along the lines of a painfully deprived puppy. Under the omnipresent slogan of "your friend, Korea", they had taken care to design every aspect of the pavilion short of the trash bags as somehow symbolizing the deep bond between the two countries, presumably made that much deeper by them being physically parted by the world's largest madhouse-cum-prison. It rather makes you wonder why China had not yet rolled over and conquered North Korea before lunch, considering its twenty-three million residents would not even be a third of the Expo visitor quota. The point of this tirade being that South Korea is a very enthusiastic country, populated, so it seems by the contents of their pavilion, entirely by boy bands and characters in 3D animation. Their horrifically bizarre movie about a cowardly magical-wish-fulfillment-service-worker and the Littlest Wheelchair Patient would have made even the most toughened of Japanese schoolgirls hang her tiny bunny-eared hat in defeat. They do, however, have one merit that puts them above and beyond all other Expo displays: a reasonable grasp on the English language. I could sing, I tell you, sing.
Other than these two bad trips, today was a day of unexpected delights. After doing some photographic catchup on the more interesting pavilions in the Asia section, I went wandering around the European section with no intent beyond taking Even More Pictures, only to discover that there really does exist such as thing as a line-less pavilion. Possibly because it was 11C and drizzling. I ended up wandering in and out of some of the smaller European pavilions and learning that seventy million Chinese can, indeed, be wrong. The Czech Pavilion was phenomenal in its oddities, prompting half a dozen small videos that will no doubt come in handy next time I want to set a movie on an organic spaceship; the Polish Pavilion surprised with its very clever interior design and its utterly engaging short movie on the history of Poland, as it does tend to escape the mind that Poland has a history before 1939, discounting some time-traveling engineers of whom we prefer not to speak. It's the Finland Pavilion, however, that really scores today's top marks: on the outside, it looks very much like an impregnable castle built to confuse the enemy into thinking it's actually a teacup. On the inside, before you get to the simple, clean and lovely display on the Finnish lifestyle, it features a long winding path between smooth white walls, curved and shaded just so, to give an intense feeling of walking through a snowy landscape. With so very little, it rivals the China Pavilion for mood-setting. Clever people, them sauna freaks.
The all-important feature of the European section of the Expo, however, is the presence of Eruopean food. In one small courtyard, you find yourself within reach of whipped-cream-covered Finnish pancakes, Belgian fries and waffles, fish&chips, Swiss chocolate - the list goes on, and on, and on, and even my stomach is only so big. The thing about Chinese food is that you can never be sure whether you love or loath it until the third bite: in the first couple of bites, you simply aren't yet sure what you're tasting. And by the third bite, you are usually committed, by merit of having paid for the obscenity in question if nothing else. Forget the fancy pavilions: I plan to spend all of tomorrow in a state of one continuous lunch.
Having so run out of witticisms, I'll conclude on a note that's been bothering me for a few days: Chinese babies love me. Having never seen such a wide-eyed, pale-haired freak before, they stare at me slack jawed with amazement, encouraged on by their parents, who being Chinese, have a sense of manners completely different from our own. It never gets old, but also never stops being just slightly disturbing.
I was not very big in Japan, but I am huge in little China.