Wednesday, September 14, 2005

evening all!
last weekend i finally managed to get my bum over to the famed and all too often mentioned Aichi Expo! as it is closing its huge doors in two weeks i experienced a severe case of torschlusspanik: currently there are about 200'000 people rushing in and out of the place each day. i now know what cattle must feel like. all in all it was clean good and friggin expensive fun. we ( texas ben and i) caught a scorcher of a late summer day, a busy monday with queues ranging between 0-150 minute waits. needless to say we didn't do any of the waiting ones so instead we visited tiny pavillions of great and widley unknown countries such as buthan, azerbaijan, georgia, switzerland etc. a special "merci velmol!" goes out to the slick boys and girls at the swiss pavillion. after asking one of the edelweis-clad lads about the waiting time in my best colloquial suisudoitsugo (schwiizertuetsch) about waiting times he looked at the massive line and said something about 80 minutes. after i asked if whether it was worth it he honestly replied "i wouldn't bother" with a smile. after that he discreetly asked the rest of the team via earbug if he could let in a couple of schwyyzer (ben wisely sealed his southern lips) and 3 minutes later we were equipped with WWII flashlights converted into info-machines, with which one can flash a light at the various sensors inside the cave-like pavilion and it would tell you a cute story about the proud achievemensts of the swiss. with all the charm and warmth of a zivilschutzbunker that is simulating a biological weapon attack. interesting, if a little dark. especially intriguing were the plastic domes inside that somehow amplified one's voice if you happen to stand in the right angle and spot. most peculiar. i found out about nicollier, piccard, hodler, pipilotti and heidi. and at the end there's that computermodelled angular landscape that's supposed to be monterosa or something (photo 20) i give the swiss pavillion a 7.1 for innovation and solidarity :) i felt a bit guilty looking at all the poor japanese souls who dutifully waited their 80 minutes to see that. but hey..i didn't ask for it, they offered. thanks again, fellas. here are the pix:
nepal basically was a big hippy market stall, with pretty much everything for sale that was in there. buthan was much nicer and some very beautiful buddhist art. the caucasus was a bit bland but still entertaining enough, the contraption that romania built was a bit waterwheel that was propelled by the people entering the pavillion. very neat. cuba and bosnia were exceptionally and disappointingly boring, so mexico offered a fresh alternative. the biggest surprise were four full grown peyote buttons, the living alternative to about 10 lsd trips. considering japan's drug laws, i'm not sure if that's ok, but hey..let's assume they were fiercly guarded. the andes-amazon pavillion had some fantastic photos, of which i took photos. my favourite is the sloth.
considering japanese-chinese ties at the moment, the queue at the awesome chinese pavillion was adequately small. read: non-existent. the carvings in there are some of the best i've ever seen, the show was cool, the staff nice and the design fantastic. go china! sri lanka also had a fascinating and simple idea: they just brought in some local crafts and tradespeople. gemcutters, weavers, cooks, etc who happily showed off their skills in a huge hall.　easy but very nice.
all the other pavillions had massive queues and i quite frankly just couldn't be fu.., uhm..asked. which means that the ones really worth seeing were out of reach but hey, still a good day.
that's it for now. sleep well!

gg; 1:01 am