Most of the people we encountered in Shanghai strongly discouraged us from going to the World Expo, going so far as to say that it was a horrible waste of time and money. Ok, so they weren’t entirely wrong, but we went with some pretty specific questions in mind; high on that list was: how are cultural highlights of a nation, within the confines of a temporary architectural space, presented? I can honestly say, I wasn’t blown away by anything but the world expo machine itself – millions of people mostly from all over China who stood in lines to see what the world had to offer them.