One day Shanghai Expo Tour

Most people choose to queue for longer than 20 minutes to visit the pavilions. It wastes time, just like wasting your money. I rather go to see the pavilions of some small countries.

I grabbed some lunch (I was so hungry I think I inhaled it) and headed for the European zone, to try the smaller Eastern European countries, and the less popular African pavilions.

It was interesting to compare the smaller countries' pavilions with monoliths. The smaller countries - particularly the emerging Eastern European countries - were there to advertise their country and culture. To put it on the map for people who ask - where IS Moldova? And, of course, to attract tourism. The larger countries, smugly assuming that the visitors were already interested in them, either tried to sell a concept, like GB, or offered entertainment and gimmicks to the astounded crowd, like Japan.

The gimmicky pavilions were fun, a bit like visiting a theme park. The most popular pavilions, for example, was the Swiss one, which you were taken round in a real ski lift. Attractions like this meant that the queues were horrendous - 4 hours was not the longest! And the queue itself tended to put me off.

However, the smaller pavilions were often staffed by home nationals, which was great from my point of view (we would inevitably gravitate the dancers were great towards one another as two foreigners) as I got to talk to some really interesting people and get their views on China - "different", mostly.

My conclusion, however, was that the Expo is aimed, somewhat naturally, towards Chinese visitors who will not have the opportunity to visit the countries for real, rather than foreign tourists who may well. Hardly a break-through, I realize, but it took a night and day for me to grasp that.

This was nowhere more apparent than with the Expo passports. It was possible to buy - and I did - an Expo passport, and to get stamps for each pavilion you entered. Most of the Chinese visitors I saw took this extremely seriously and were stamp collecting - sometimes not even looking at the pavilion at all. I am told that full Expo passports are sold for hundreds of RMB on Chinese E-bay. I have a few stamps, but I wasn't a serious collector.

Expo's out and tired, I returned back to the hostel driven by my driver, had dinner with a random English guy I met in a restaurant (another person I disturbed over dinner), who, I feel, held me rather in contempt for my poor Mandarin - fair enough, and went to bed. Perchance to rest my aching feet.