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World Expo 2005 Sep 1, 2005

September 1, 2005

Aichi, Japan

Natalya

It took us a whole month to finally decide on a date to visit the World Expo in Aichi, Japan. We heard that Expo here is very busy, especially on Japanese holidays and weekends. We finally decided to go on Thursday, September 1. We later found out that close to 170,000 people visited the Expo that day. No wonder why it was so busy.

Aichi is located about 6 hours by car from Tokyo and about 45 minutes away from Nagoya. We took the 6:20am train in the morning and in 2 hours were in Nagoya. The subway from Nagoya to Aichi was packed. Once we got to Aichi we had to transfer to Limini - a magnetic lavitating train. The ride was only 5 minutes long, but the wait for it was enourmous. We got to the gates and saw a massive crowd of people waiting for the mandatory security check prior to entering the Expo site. Finally close to 10:45am we were finally walking through the North Gate.

We have done a lot of reading on how to best plan a day at the Expo and decided to head for the busiest pavillions to get advanced reservations for later in the day. We had to work our way through a massive crowd of people only to find out that 4 out of 5 popular pavillions were sold out for advanced reservations. That meant that we could either wait 4 to 5 hours in line or skip them all together. Nevertheless, we were very excited to get an advanced reservation for the Hitachi pavillion for 7:30pm.

Right away we headed to explore The Interactive Fun zone, which was very cool and had many different robots on display - from cleaning robots to receptionist robots to child care robots. They even had a walking dinosaur robot.

Somehow I managed to convince Dave to go on the World's largest ferris wheel and the ride was very neat. I could not beleive how high we got and the view was breathtaking. It also allowed us to plan our route for the rest of the morning because we could see which pavillions were less crowded.

I was most looking forward to see the 19,000 year old frozen mammoth that was found in Siberia. It was very exciting to get advanced reservations and get in to the pavillion. I was a bit disappointed that it was not the whole mammoth, but only the head and a part of its leg, but it was still very impressive. You could see the flesh and skin and fur all intact and it looked like an old furry elephant. It was just remarkable. I wonder if the scientists will be using its DNA to try to clone one.

Despite enourmous crowds I definitely recommend making it to Expo if you can - there are still 3 weeks left. Dave will write more.