I am currently sitting at the audience seat of a special event: Shanghai Expo Australian Expo Pavilion Foundation Completion Ceremony. I was invited by Ogilvy Public Relationship Shanghai as a "journalist" of digital media – interestingly enough, this is the first time. The original ceremony was planned to be held before the Australian Pavilion construction site (wow!) but now it was moved to a conference room inside the Expo Land building due to the heavy rain this morning. As you can imagine, it is not fun at all if you have to get to the center of a construction site in this weather. Pretty disappointed, to be honest, and I want to find other ways to get into the site – I mean before the Expo starts. I am a big fan of construction site.
The Australian Pavilion
The Australian Pavilion has been shown in Metro stations and along the roads across the whole Shanghai. I just understood that the reddish color of the pavilion symbolizes the red earth of Australia – I didn’t think about it yet.
Image in courtesy of Australia Pavilion and Shanghai Expo website
Photo taken by Jian Shuo Wang via Nokia N78
The Meaning of an Expo?
Many of my readers, my friends, and even me for some time were wondering why there should be an Expo at the first place.
Culture Event
The Australia Pavilion, for example, has a big performance center with capacity of 1000 people on the 3th floor of the pavilion. There will be art performance there (daily?).
Imagine that even without an Expo, how many culture events happening everywhere across the globe? You see many performance from many countries in the Oriental Performance Art center, and events like France year in China, and China Year in France. What a great idea to have an altogether party for every country to participate? That is the idea behind World Expo.
VIP Business Areas
According to the materials they distribute, there will be 200+ invitation only business meetings inside the pavilion. Whoever challenges about why have meetings should admit that it is way more effective to have gather everyone in a bigger party, than having many 1:1 meetings. A big meeting involves one travel arrangement for each party, while the other way means thousands of travels from so many parties. To have a business meeting center inside the Pavilion is a great idea. I am sure many pavilions do the same. To have a 100-day "big meeting", it brings everyone from the world to gather in one site (Expo Site), and help to facilitate communication and boost business opportunities.
Australian Food
This morning’s event include show case of Australian food. According to the organizer, the food were prepared by the same food vendor for the Australia Pavilion in 2010.
Photo taken by Jian Shuo Wang
Photo taken by Jian Shuo Wang
I am not a big fan of food, and it is a waste of resource to give me really good food (especially western food – I just feel I am a rabbit). For breakfast, Baozi + Bean Milk seem a better combination than cake + orange juice. I believe that is the reason to have food exchange program to help people understand the difference of food.
BTW, when Mr. Peter Tesch, Commissioner-General of the Expo effort from DFAT fo Australia told us what to expect, he mentioned “The drinks will be cold, and the food will be delicious…”. I thought to myself, it would be a great chance in this Expo event to help to translate the meaning of “the drink will be cold” into Chinese, because, for Chinese people, if you say, the drink will be cold, that is worst thing. We say, the tea will be hot… :-) By mixing the culture and business of Australia and China together would be the most beneficial thing I can imagine in the coming expo.
The New Logo
The new logo of the Australia Pavilion is very nice. Without any explanation, I can recognize the Australia map, the blue sky, the red earth, and the golden sand beach. I would not have had the ability to understand it without my rewarding trip to Australia in October 2007.
Good luck to the construction of the Australia Pavilion, and look forward to experience the great “Journey” the Pavilion promised to 70 million visitors in 2010.
P.S. Anna sent me the picture of the Australia Pavilion construction site:
Credit: anonymous
It seems we didn’t miss too much today. :-)
I’m wondering the exhibition must be very cool, because I have the imagination of Sydney Opera House. I am, however, looking forward to your on-site photos.
I love the yummy in your photo, and I love hot tea, Haha , just which happens when Eest Meets West.
Westerners would never eat cake for breakfast.
Not enough green and gold… :/
I visited Shanghai for Christmas 2008 and I was overwhelmed by the work going on in preparation for Expo.
I cherish my photo of the Maglev Train travelling at 430 kph. As an Australian I can tell you there are more Chinese Restaurants than any other culture, even American McDonalds. We eat a lot of meat – Beef, Pork, Lamb, Chicken,Turkey and Duck. We drink our tea hot and beer very cold, but you can buy iced tea. A very popular Australian meal is Roasted leg of lamb with vegetables (potatoes,parsnip,carrot,peas or beans) we wash that down with a good Australian red wine like Shiraz or Cabinet Sauvignon. We have the biggest houses in the world, but still enjoy to eat a Bar-B-Q in the back yard of the house, with lamb chops,T Bone steak and sausages.; we usually drink beer or wine with this.
I live in Broken Hill where the mining company BHP (Broken Hill Proprietary)started, the earth is red.
I would encourage everyone to go to Expo 2010, you will have the time of your life.