Italy Trip- Day #4: Time at the Milan Expo
Compared to our arrival in Dublin last year when we were all knocked over like we took a brick to the face, we were sprightly our first full day in Milan.
We woke up in the hotel and headed out around lunchtime to the “Giganza,” a shopping mall near our hotel. We were searching for, in no particular order: food, SIM cards for our phones, and shoes for Monkey since her feet were killing her.
After taking care of the necessaries, we made a plan for taking on the Milan Expo. The best way to describe The Expo is a World’s Fair…about food…
The official description: With Milan selected as the host-city for the Universal Exposition, Italy then chose Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life as its central theme. Expo Milano 2015 talks about the problems of nutrition and the resources of our planet. The idea is to open up a dialogue between international players, and to exchange views on these major challenges which impact everyone.
One hundred forty-five countries, and three international organizations accepted the invitation to be part of this amazing extravaganza. (The link is worth following because it shows the design of each building that the countries built for this event.)
Open every day from May 1 through October 31 of 2015, we thought the excitement would have died down since we were there in late September.
We could not have been more wrong. The helpful woman right inside the gates who handed us a map and gave us an overview of where to go shook her head and said, “Walk down the main thoroughfare, but it is going to be crowded. This is the busiest day at the Expo…ever.”
Shoot, we’ve been to Disney. What could this Milan Expo have that Disney didn’t try to hand us?
Hundreds of thousands of people.
More on that in a minute.
As someone who has planned many events over the years, I was fascinated by the sheer volume of organization and visioning done to create this massive event that covered nearly one million square meters. (United States citizens, that means really, really big.)
We parked at Arese, and then took a shuttle bus into the Expo. As you can see from the map, they have parking and shuttles running all around the outside of the Expo, not to mention “people mover” shuttles inside the expo.
Buds had brilliantly pre-paid for our parking so we didn’t have to stand in line behind one hundred other people to get a parking sticker. We did have to wait in line with many new Italian friends waiting to get on the shuttle bus, though. They only loaded the bus as full as the number of seats, which turned out to be wise since we didn’t realize the ride from parking to the Expo would take as long as it did.
The map of the Expo is here, but it doesn’t even attempt to give the feel of the scope and grandeur of the event. It was so festive and the buildings were stunningly beautiful, and there were so darn many people. We had written my Italian phone number on each child’s arm in permanent marker, and we had a designated spot to return to if one of us got lost, but it still had a feeling of inevitability that we would lose someone. (Spoiler alert…we didn’t.)
To watch a video of the “rainmaker” moving billboard that was part of the U.S.A’s display, click here: Rainmaker.
https://goo.gl/photos/8SmwsTtFc58QYLCa9
Overall the Expo was amazing. It was an overwhelming number of people, but we found quiet spaces, and Buster attempted to talk with other children in Italian. We tried our first gelato in Italy, saw some beautiful buildings, ate some good food, and held hands tightly.
A successful evening over all.
