Expo...the sequel

I want you to know…we haven’t taken this Expo thing lightly…we have season passes (thank goodness) and have already gone 9 times. No, we haven’t seen everything yet. Back to the favorites
Egypt is another spectacular pavilion. It is full of artifacts and you can get up close and even touch some of them! We had to ask…they’re all replicas. Oh well…they do look very good. They even have an open sarcophagus with a very dried out mummy in it and to our untutored eyes it looks quite real. And for the food update…they also have vegetarian food. Not much, one item, but hey that’s good in a dedicated carnivorous society. All of the food is native food but ‘tweaked’ to accommodate the tastes of the Japanese. Fish is frequently found in many of the dishes, whether it’s native or not.
At night they have a Koi Pond performance. They use the water and laser lights, similar to Disneyland, to show a number of typically Japanese characters. I’m afraid the story is lost on some of us but the display is quite nice. Pretty simple but entertaining to watch once. They also have “swaying towers” – 3 very tall towers (they’re INTO towers here) that are created so that they can be moved back and forth, in time to the gentle music they play. They also have a “south pointing puppet on a cart” that shows up every half hour. The puppet pulling the cart does some gymnastics as it moves the cart around. The puppets are very flexible here and there’s a long tradition in creating some pretty elaborate puppets in Japan. There are even whole museums dedicated just to puppetry and they do major puppet show productions.
Stay tuned for the next episode….

EXPO!! First installment!

Bampaku or the Aichi World Exposition is a fantastic place to visit. There are pavilions representing over 100 different countries and food to go with them.
We have a few favorite pavilions. Mexico is fantastic – plus I understand what they’re saying – very important! You enter at the sea and climb up through the desert and into the mountains and the caves. It’s really quite a feat, considering how small the area is. The cave actually has the drip, drip, drip of slowly falling water.
Singapore is fantastic. They have a few dancers who performed a few native dances – with a twist…one of the costumed characters would suddenly drop to the floor and do some break dancing routines, jump up and they’d all continue dancing. He was quite popular. They have a room of memories…hollow books are opened up to display an item of some sort with writing about why it was important to the person. A purple heart was there, a cleat from a shoe (they won the game), jacks, report cards, doll set of dishes….lots of touching, little things about life. Really a cool idea and you could spend a long time opening up the boxes.
Another favorite pavilion is India. It really does one of the best jobs of sticking to the theme “nature's wisdom”. You enter to see two well-known symbols of India - the Bodhi Tree and the Dharmachakra (wheel of truth/reincarnation concept). They have a towering tree in the center and most of the information kind of flows around it. Really a calming pavilion to go through. Not only that – they have vegetarian food!!!!