A trip around the world in one day - EXPO DAY ONE

To get to the expo from Nagoya, take the ‘expo express’ to bampaku-yakusa where you need to pay the 380 yen per person fare change because the train does not go on JR tracks to the station, then you need to buy a 180 yen ticket per person to ride the Linimo train. The Linimo is a linear motion magnetic levitation train (MagLev) which uses superconducting magnets to propel the train over the tracks instead of on the tracks, eliminating friction on the rails. Basically, it was a VERY smooth train ride. Once at the expo, we found that we needed to reserve tickets for the most popular pavilions (Toyota, Hitachi, Toshiba, etc.) but Toshiba also had a reeeaaaaallllllyyyy long line for non-reserved patrons. Being the Disneyland Alumni that we are, we got into the line, and two and a half hours later were into the theatre. The Toshiba exhibit was focused on this CG (computer graphics) movie on the future. The great thing was that you stuck your head in a box where imaging equipment was located, and it took a picture of your face to insert into the movie! When the group that we were with was done sticking their heads in the boxes, we went into the theatre. After two and a half hours of standing in a line, we were very grateful to sit down and watch the movie. But then again, we were in Japan, so the movie itself was in, yes you guessed it, Japanese. It was really funny seeing our faces speaking, surprisingly well, Japanese with deep accents. After this show, we moved on to the world exhibits, which did not feature lines. We started in the beautiful country of Libya! They seem to have the world’s biggest manmade river there now, and are really proud of it. After there, we visited Tunisia, who had a really nice exhibit on their culture. We walked out of there to the central square where there were two dancers, a man and his daughter, performing acts such as the little girl balanced doing upside-down splits on top of her father’s head. After this exiting performance, dad and I went to Morocco where we learned of the history of Morocco as Carthage and met some of the artisans there. We continued to travel around the pavilions (Most of Africa, Russia, Poland, UK, etc.) and at last ended up finishing with the Australian pavilion. There we had dinner (burger and some fish and chips) and made our way back to the Linimo home.

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