Shanghaied

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The ostenisble reason for travelling to Shanghia was to play in the Australian rules football Asian championships. It perhaps sounds grander than it is, and given that I played in it, the evidence is strong that it is open to anyone of even marginal mobility.

But the lure of Shanghai extends well beyond AFL. There's the Expo and Shanghai itself, an interesting city of historic buildings, and many that will some day deserve to be viewed as historic.

I arrived at Expo just after it opened for the day - me and more than a million others. It was my good fortune to arrive on the busiest day of the entire expo. It is hard to feel alone in Shanghai - this day especially so, and I mingled with a pleasant and patient crowd for 40 minutes just to get in - and that was after I had bought the ticket!

The queues for some of the pavilions were six hours deep - China, Saudi Arabia (both of them remarkable buildings), USA, Japan - with Australia and others a more comfortable four or five hours. Spooky, but people seemed content to wait. Although the queues themselves looked interesting, I spent my time admiring the pavilions from the outside, and that in itself was interesting and rewarding.

The photos don't do the pavilions justice, and each person will have their own favorites, but mine were the Saudi, China, Australia, The Netherlands, and the UK.

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