Writer: Jourdon Miller
This weekend, a big group of UIUC Students traveled to Milan for the 2015 Universal Exposition. We had one day to explore the city of Milan and one day for the expo. It was my first trip outside of Spain and also my first experience of knowing absolutely none of the language with no one to help me either. On the first morning, we were hoping to get breakfast before our long day, so we walked into a cafe next to the apartment we were staying in. We soon realized we had no idea how to say please, thank you, or anything beneficial. So with nothing to say, we helplessly made our way out. From now on, I will be looking up helpful phrases before I visit different countries!
Milan has some absolutely beautiful architecture. The plaza outside of the Duomo di Milano was covered in balloons for a charity event. Each balloon had a bag of food attached to it, and when someone would donate money to starving people of Africa, they would receive a balloon to place on a plate. Once all the balloons were in place, it made an image of Africa that you could see from on top of the Duomo. It was a great weekend to be there!
Milan has some absolutely beautiful architecture. The plaza outside of the Duomo di Milano was covered in balloons for a charity event. Each balloon had a bag of food attached to it, and when someone would donate money to starving people of Africa, they would receive a balloon to place on a plate. Once all the balloons were in place, it made an image of Africa that you could see from on top of the Duomo. It was a great weekend to be there!
On Sunday, the UIUC students went to the Milan Expo. The theme of this expo was Feeding the Planet, so hundreds of countries designed and built pavilions to display their efforts in food production and show off their culture. The popular pavilions of this year were Japan (which on some days had a 7 hour wait to get inside), Brazil, China, and the United Kingdom. My friend Bradley and I bought Expo Passports that you could have stamped at each country's pavilion, so we ran around visiting as many pavilions as we could. The passport is a really cool souvenir to show off all the places you went, and we had a lot of fun going into some pavilions we probably wouldn't have visited otherwise, so I highly recommend it. The American pavilion was interesting and had a rotating green wall on the right side of the building which was really impressive. The light display of China's pavilion was probably my favorite... and the Chinese food of course! :)