from www.wheredaily.com

It’s barely a week to the opening of Expo 2010 in Shanghai and the city is holding its breath. While this global tradition that dates back to 1851 and put the Eiffel Tower in Paris promises to be the biggest World Expo to date in size and scope, it will also attract some of the biggest crowds ever – some 70 million are expected to attend. Most of those visitors will hail from China herself, whose masses are fast becoming the world’s largest market for potential outbound tourism.

Already the city is abuzz with cranes and welders working last minute corners to open the Expo by May and turn the city into the golden door its officials want it to be. Even the famous Peace Hotel on the Bund, the original 19^th century Sassoon building closed for two years or more for renovations, hopes to open its Art Deco portals by the time the Expo shoots off the first round of fireworks. The grand widening of the Bund’s corniche along the Huangpu is now finished and a glistening success, filled with Chinese visitors taking photographs with the Jetson-like AT&T Tower in the background across the river. A brand new subway line, number 13, is in place to ferry passengers speedily through town and arrive at the Expo site in just minutes.

This year’s festivities run May through October, have more than 200 countries participating, spread out along two square miles on both sides of the Huangpu, feature 24 acres of shopping and dining, run more than 100 performances daily on stages throughout the complex and cost more than $45 billion to build.

Grand enough, the pavilions promise to bring on the sound bites. Japan is featuring robotic violinists. America is running a “4D” movie about dreaming and change in the blighted city. France is floating its pavilion on water while Switzerland has a lush roof garden traversed by highflying gondolas. Saudi Arabia has spent the most to bring over a “halfmoon ship,” a hanging boat shaped like a celestial cresscent with imported date palms planted on the top deck as a sort of hanging garden of Babylon. Bedouin tents flap amid the date palm trees welcoming visitors with tea and incense and famous traditions of Bedouin hospitality.

China, of course, has the biggest pavilion of them all. It’s a traditional red tower nearly 200 feet tall built in a bracket design called Dougong widely used during the Spring and Autumn Period (770 BC-467 BC). China, too, features a movie – an eight-minute 360-degrees in all directions film about the history of development in China from rural to urban.

The theme for this year’s Expo is Better City, Better Life and the focus is on the new urban vision: sustainability, community, the uplifting of the human condition. Some 270 countries, corporations, agencies, NGOs and industries are coming together throughout the 184 days to share ideas and showcase ingenuity.

Lines are long so visitors who have easy access to Shanghai are advised to leave the lumbering China pavilion for another time. As the Expo site deconstructs according to regulations at the end of the Expo, the China pavilion stays on indefinitely.

Tickets range from $22 to $29 for single day tickets and $58 and $131 for three- and seven-day admissions. Buy them at Expo offices and travel agents around Shanghai or from travel agencies in the US, such as Danville, CA-based Peregrine Travel (925-984-4984; www.worldexpochina.net), which is an official purveyor of tickets for the Expo.

For more information contact the Chinese National Tourism Office (www.CNTO.org); Shanghai Tourism (www.meet-in-shanghai.net); and Shanghai Expo 2010 (http://en.expo2010.cn).