Greetings from Shanghai

This trip has been pretty amazing so far. Unfortunately, it's taken me a few days to be able to access my blog in order to report.



Friday, I was honored to be the guest of the Australian Pavilion for a quick tour around the Expo 2010 site under construction and an amazing look at the Australian Pavilion under construction. It's truly amazing how much creativity and time-consuming work goes into creating a pavilion that likely been in operation for just 6 months, hosting 5 million of the 70+ million visitors expected.

I'm deeply grateful to the folks at Ogilvy PR and World Expo Blog who were able to arrange my visit, Michael Darragh and Lina Han. Our Australian Pavilion host Peter Sams, who I was delighted to find out was a reader of my site and blog, is the pavilion director and veteran of the Australian Pavilion at Expo 2005 in Aichi.

I've posted some photos from the visit at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/expomuseum/

Saturday, I played the role of a more traditional tourist and visited People's Park and the adjacent shopping areas. In People's Park, the city has an Urban Planning Museum which, right now, is mostly about their preparations for Expo 2010.

I was rather tickled to see a couple of my photos in an exhibit about the history of expo mascots. It's rather satisfying to see photos of my own world's fair memorabilia collection in a museum on the other side of the planet.

Haibao and ads for Expo 2010 blanket nearly every square foot of surface in this town that's not under construction. As I type this in my hotel room, I can hear the sounds of construction from various places in the city. As with Nagoya and Hannover, which I also visited in the year before their respective expos, the whole city is getting ready and everything seems to have the same deadline: 1 May 2010, opening day of Expo 2010.

I have plans to meet more folks that are working behind the scenes here in Shanghai. It must be thrilling to be working on all the little projects that will come together next year in the largest world's fair in history. I'm reminded of what it must have been like to work on the World's Columbian Exposition the year before: 1892. I find myself pondering what sort of anticipation there was in 1938, the year before New York's 1939-'40 New York World's Fair. In so many ways, I see parallels between Shanghai's Expo 2010 and Osaka's Expo '70. Imagine what it must have been like being a part of putting that together in 1969!