Day 506 - 12th August 2008

I think I have possibly mentioned before that I am rather partial to Zaragoza, a pleasant city up in northern Spain.

What better place then, in my opinion, to hold a World Fair, or an International Expo as it's now called. For those amongst us who don't know what one of those is, it's basically a big show where loads of countries have a stand and flaunt their goods.

It was at a world fair that the Eiffel Tower was built, and that Picasso's Guernica painting was unveiled to the world. Times have changed somewhat since then, and now everything runs around one common theme - water in this case.

So, aside from the countries involved, there were loads and loads of different things to see with no attachment to any nation. The picture above being part of one of them, perhaps the most impressive. It consists of a huge tower, which looks like a tear drop from above, with a massive sculpture inside resembling falling water frozen in time. At the top, there's a bar. To get an idea of the sheer scale of this, those stripes you can see on the back wall are different floors on the 22 storey building - walkways ingeniously designed in a double helix, much a like a car park, one up, one down. The idea is to climb to the top, then walk straight back down again without ever seeing anyone coming the other way. What an idea it is, and what a success it is indeed.

There were so many of these exhibitions that we didn't end up seeing a huge amount of countries in the end - things like a simulator with wind and rain included and a giant walk-in water cage were all on the menu here.

From the countries' point of view though, there were some interesting ideas on the stalls there too. I say stalls, but each nation got a huge room to itself, most of them had massive queues to get into - the Germans and the Japanese were very popular, both were boasting two hour waits to get in.

Some were just reflections on a nation - France was unsurprisingly pretentious, with everything going on in the dark, Senegal had some African drummers and dancers battering away like there's no tomorrow, which was refreshing, and Belgium was just weird.

Actually, Belgium was, even for Belgium, really quite shit. First of all, they had recreated a 'Belgian horizon' which was just a big patch of field with load of mist being pumped onto it, then, as you moved into the second and final part of their display, there were a load of bath tubs, one with a bronze dead guy in. Wow Belgium, you really are pretty freaky.

One surprise was the Afghanistan room, which, although bare and devoid of many visitors, was one of the more interesting ones. Frankly, it was just loads of pictures of the place with a load of pretty nice carpets on show, but it was fascinating to get a different angle on a place known for being severely hammered by pretty much every western nation. Sure, I knew there were mountains there, but only because that's where they reckon Bin Laden was hiding.

Anyway, I've gone on a long time and it's excruciatingly late, but I must mention that it was a complete no-show on Britain's part, probably not such a bad idea mind you. The Americans weren't there either, but they're probably banned because they'd outshine all the other stalls, they are rather good at that kind of thing. Oh yeah, and they are also screwing all the money they can out of about every other country attending, that's the one's they're not bombing the living out of.