Well, the bottom line is: This expo ain’t much.  Our overall impression is that it is just not quite…  But that didn’t stop us from having a very enjoyable day.  First we had to go get the wheel chair we had reserved.  Crazy thing is that from the train arrival to the place where you pick it up is about a 10 minute walk.

After that we found the Tim store so we finally both have working phones.  They were having a lot of problems so it took forever.  We kept leaving to explore right around the store but here’s a picture of Ken and the really adorable, Russian woman who was helping us

Franciacorta tasting table

Interesting sculpture–there are many.

By the time we finished all of that “business” we were hungry.  We got a wonderful sausage and “fariella” (cooked greens) sandwich from a food stand.

One of the highlights was a tasting at the Franciacorta area.  Franciacorta is an area in Northern Italy where they make a fabulous champagne stye wine of the same name.  We had to pay for the tasting of 5 wines but it was well worth the price.  Especially sine we were the only ones who had signed up for the 3:00 tasting so we got lots of attention.

I watched a cooking demo for a while and we walked/rode a lot.  We went into the super market of the future–interesting automated produce handling and large computer screens for pricing.

Everywhere there are small staging areas for music and dance.  And sometimes they are kind of oppressive.  There was never quiet moment the whole visit.

There are lots of amazing, large scale sculptures.  They were hard to photograph but this one came

out pretty well to give you the idea.

We never made it to the end of the Expo, geographically.  And that’s where the USA pavilion is.  Domani…

We went into the China pavilion.  I loved the display of marigolds in front.  The interior was not much except for a really great lite show.

We had heard that Brazil was a  one not to miss and as we were leaving the line was way shorter.  The big deal there is that you have to enter by walking on the huge woven rope, Survivor style, trampoline type thing.  It was challenging and some people were falling.  I didn’t really get the point.  Maybe it was to represent the canopy of the rain forest because they had a display of tropical plants below.

As we were leaving Ken took this shot of me standing in front of these adorable food people:

We made it home, pretty worn out.  We ate some fruit and stuff in the apartment (which is small but great, by the way) and went out for gelato in our neighborhood.