Europe 2015: Expo

Expo 2015 (formerly known as the World's Fair) just happened to be in Milan this year. Since we've somewhat had our fill of cathedrals, castles, and museums, we decided to do something different and see Expo. We arrived at about 2pm; it's open til 11.

Expo is on the eastern side of the city, and the metro station is this huge underground thing that extends to the Expo entrance. Ticket offices are in that space; there's room to accommodate huge crowds, but it was nearly empty when we were there.

A couple hundred yards later is the entrance. Again, no crowds

The theme of this Expo is food - lots of buzzwords like "feed the planet" and "sustainability" and "water resources". It's all pretty fluffy and somewhat shallow like an 8th grade science fair exhibit, but that's what Expo is anymore. Nothing like "world's first Ferris wheel" or Nikola Tesla demonstrating his newly invented AC electricity generators. Those days are long gone. Now It's really sort of like EPCOT, and the real attraction is the event and architecture.

And, for an event focused on food, I expected more samples. Seriously - almost no one gave out free samples, it was all €3 for this and €5 for that. Boooo!

The venue is organized as a half-mile-long covered walkway with buildings on either side. Without the cover, the sun would be unbearable. The distance is hard to capture - it took us 3 hours to walk the right-hand side (including seeing exhibits)

Many countries have their own building, but some smaller countries are grouped by their main food product. Here's the Basmati pavilion - 6 or 8 countries that produce basmati rice

And Guatemala inside the coffee pavilion

And in front of Ethiopia, also in the coffee pavilion

Azerbaijan had its own building, with a cool two story tree thing

Spain gets my vote as most creative. They have a room with dinner plates on the walls and ceiling onto which they project video. It's all aligned so they can show stuff on individual plates or use them as a mosaic

Here's a mosaic.

The floor is plexiglas with backlight plates under it, thus all 6 surfaces are animated

Great Britan has this very cool metal hive-like thing that you can go up and inside. It lights up at night

There's also a building called "the Supermarket Of The Future". This is where you see futuristic things like a robot arm selecting an apple for you. It is a working supermarket, but I can't imagine who would by, say, ground beef in the middle of Expo

I thought it was all sort of lame until you see this at the exit. You can send stuff home - now I get it! Bee said that she saw & mentioned this at the entrance but Iissed it because was too busy criticizing the apple robot

At a couple places they had these fun chairs. They're plastic, and you can rotate them in circles. When you lean back it feels like you'll fall over backward, so it takes a bit to gain trust. Bee got really good at it. Everyone who does it laughs the whole time

Somewhere in the middle was this place that didn't seem to have a country affiliation, but made for a fun pic

Slovenia had its own building, and they featured skis by Elan, the Cosby that invented the now-ubiquitous side it ski. What that has to with food I don't know BUT they had both Dave-era and Bee-era skis

They also had an Oculus VR headset with which you could visit many locations throughout their country. I'd never used one before and it was amazing! Look up and down, spin around, etc - it felt like you were! It was sort of disorienting to take them off - it took about 15 seconds for your brain to realize that you are at the Expo, not on a hilltop in XXXX

Austria had a fun walk-thru path with high-banked plants and mist sprayers. Honestly felt like you were out in the cool forest

And then we happened upon McDonalds

The Russia pavilion had samples - free vodka shots! We both had one (Bee's 1st taste of vodka) and I wish I had made a movie of it. Take the shot, wait about 3 seconds then her eyes got big and she started coughing, then said "wow - that'll put hair on your chest!"

The U.S. Pavilion was LAME. Lots of red, white, and blue, but nothing interesting inside, and only one guy inside was American. WTF? For actual food, out back was a small asphalt parking lot with food trucks themed as "Food Truck Nation". The U.S. effort is embarrassing - I could do better!

In the small Senegal venue they did henna tattoos

The Kuwait pavilion had really cool computerized water messages. Water would pulse out of the top to form backlight words. This pic is of water drops falling with gravity. Cooler still was when they "wrote" words in Arabic.