Expose yourself to Hanover

By PHILIP ENGLISH

World expositions, known these days as expos, have been around since 1851 when six million people visited the first at London's Crystal Palace. A century and a half and 22 expos later there are doubts about the wisdom of nations spending up large on expensive showpieces when the audience is restricted, mainly, to ticket-buying locals.

To some, in a world shrinking through mass air travel and the internet, expos seem out-moded.

Expo 2000 in Hanover, northern Germany, was regarded as a flop before its gates opened because no one believed it would attract its projected 40 million visitors.

But the warm sensations at Expo 2000 are helping to promote Hanover as a place to be this northern hemisphere summer. The expo is also an assertion of Germany's rebirth on the international scene.



The expo is Germany's first world fair and is the world's biggest to date, with 173 nations taking part. On foot, it takes the best part of an hour to get from one side of the vast, 160ha site to the other.

New Zealand, one of the most popular exhibitors at Expo 92 in Seville, Spain, is not there. Nor is the United States.

Hanover's expo has all the ingredients of previous ones yet provokes questions about where the world is heading as it enters the 21st century.

When the gates opened on June 1 for 153 days until October 31, the crowds turned up but it is not known whether numbers are reaching the required 263,000 a day to make the expo a success.

The site contains 100,000sq m of space for the 11 exhibitions linked to the expo theme - Humankind, Nature, Technology - A new world arising.

The most popular national pavilions attract queues with waits of 90 minutes or more, so the visitor with just two or three days to spend at the fair has to decide what to see and what to miss. The thematic exhibitions are less crowded but no less interesting. The exhibitions are designed to stimulate thinking about what the world will be like in the not-too-distant future.

Transport gets its own hall, as do the environment, life sciences, basic needs and an extravagant "planet of visions."

Expo 2000 tries to find solutions to some of the world's problems, from traffic congestion to starvation and resource and energy use. The best national pavilions include the German effort, which contains a walkthrough, 720-degree cinema showing stunning film of images from the fall of the Berlin Wall to life in Germany today.

The Netherlands' pavilion illustrates how the ecologically minded Dutch can fit a lot into a small space. It showcases the Dutch landscape, sand dunes, woods and a lake, all stacked in a 40m-high, compact, five-level structure with its own electricity supply and water cycle.

Japan's pavilion is made entirely of recycled paper and after expo will be turned into school books.

The oil-rich United Arab Emirates imported a 747 jumbo-load of sand from the desert and dozens of palm trees to surround its Arabian fort complete with towers and a souk market.

Britain has taken the environmental theme of expo seriously in a no fuss but interesting pavilion focusing on diversity.

Forty African countries occupy the huge Africa Hall in which some of the continent's problems are outlined, providing a snapshot of the continent and its natural and cultural environments.

Hungary has also produced a top-rated pavilion celebrating 1000 years of history with two tall wooden structures facing each other like a pair of hands.

Those with limited time need to avoid queues so the offerings from smaller countries offer an escape that can be rewarding. The simple pleasures on offer in pavilions such as those from Poland, Rumania or Portugal are more down to earth than the experiences of the big spenders but equally as interesting.

* Philip English visited Expo 2000 as a guest of Lufthansa Airlines.