How to Walk from Brazil to Vietnam in One Day

Saturday 10:00am - Grant and his cousin singing a little song before getting in the cab and heading to the Expo.

Six hours later, somewhere in the Pacific Islands -

The Expo is a distant cousin of the World's Fair - countries form around the world come together, erect immense structures called "pavilions" and promote how great they are.

I know, it is their loss that the Expo Committee rejected my application for their Chief Marketing Officer position.

The best thing about the Expo is that it shrinks the whole world down into one square mile. You can literally walk from Tunisia to Australia to Chile in one day. (See, now don't you think that sentence would have looked great in the brochures?)

The worst thing is the lines. The queues! Whatever you want to call them, they are ridiculous. You have to wait in line for at least 3 hours for any of the decent pavilions.

Alternatively, you can go to the pavilions that have a shorter queue, but there is a reason for those short queues. Because there is nothing interesting inside that pavilion.

Around 4:30pm we were walking past the Japan Pavilion. An Expo staff member told us the wait was 4.5 hours.

Four point five hours!

I said to Buddy, "If we get in line now, we'll get into the pavilion at ... 9:00 pm!"

Buddy said, "If we got in a plane now, we could get to Japan sooner than that!"

Which made us both laugh so hard we cried.

Seriously, we could have gotten to Japan sooner than we could have gotten into that pavilion. Who in their right mind would stand in the line?

Well, obviously about 4.5 hours worth of people.

My verdict on the Expo 2010 is that you should go if you're in the area but don't plan on going into the pavilions. Just walk around and take in the atmosphere and look at the pavilions from the outside.

And if you're taking young boys with you, bring along a couple of gurneys.