Expo Park

In 1993, Daejeon (then called Taejŏn) held the international exposition. 17 years on, the site is still in use and it’s called Expo Park. It’s one of the must-do attractions in Daejeon, so this weekend Sofie and I decided to go and take a look.

Frankly, it’s a little bit bizarre. We arrived (after caught in one of the heaviest rainstorms I’ve probably ever been in), and were confronted by the ticket desk. From what we could make out, you could buy a ticket to see 3 of the attractions for 7000 won. Hmm… why would anyone want to do that, when the cost of an individual attraction is only 2000 won? Anyway, we decided not to pay and went exploring instead. First stop, the Tower of Great Light. Based on a traditional Korean observatory, apparently.

The signage at the bottom of the tower said that first you would be taken to the middle floor (that round bit in the middle), and then you could climb the stairs to the top. We took the elevator to the middle bit, had a look around and then tried to find the stairs up but alas there were none. Apparently you can’t go to the top any more.

Next stop was the Reunification Pavilion, the part of the Expo where they make a big deal about how much they’d love to become one Korea again. They even built a road! Yeh…

Then, the Science part of the Expo. This building housed an exhibition for pretty much every Institute in Daejeon (and there’s quite a lot of them). Sofie and I got really excited when we saw the one for KRIBB…

KRIBB, which is apparently elite, safe, global, proud and connected. Unfortunately the KRIBB space was a little dull, it’s no wonder kids these days aren’t interested in science.

What next? Oh! A whole space devoted to wedding costumes around the world, of course. The first few mannequins featured both a male and a female, until the designers realised that the males more or less always wear the same thing, no matter what the country. So they decided to save some space, and have women from different cultures marrying each other. Like this…

Bizarre.

For a bit of relaxation from all that learning, we headed to the theme park section, where there were actual people, unlike the rest of the park. I couldn’t work out if there was a theme for the park or not (see the photo of the alien next to the pirate ship below), and it just looked like a collection of second hand rides moved in from other places. Still quite enjoyable though.

Final port of call, the energy (saving) pavilion. Despite the key message of this exhibition being how to reduce your energy consumption, it had far more flashy things, televisions etc than any of the other exhibitions. However, in typical Korean style, it was still quite amusing. Particularly the idea of putting a scanner into a fridge. Very energy efficient.