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2009-07-01 10:00
SHANGHAI (AFP) - C Tickets went on sale Wednesday for next year's World Expo in Shanghai, where China once again plans to showcase its growing global importance by staging the most extravagant World's Fair ever.
In Shanghai, where excitement around the fair has been building for more than a year, people lined up to buy tickets at banks, post offices and mobile phone shops. As with last year's Olympics, China aims to change the way it is viewed by staging an Expo on a scale never seen before, investing 45 billion dollars -- more than it spent on the Games -- to give Shanghai a facelift.
The city expects 70 million people -- 95 percent of them Chinese -- to visit the largest-ever Expo site, which is twice the size of Monaco. Sales began at more than 2,800 outlets nationwide while overseas tickets will be sold through Ticketmaster outlets and select travel agents, Shanghai's Expo Bureau said. A standard single-day ticket costs 140 yuan (20.50 dollars), and a peak-day ticket during Chinese holidays will cost 180 yuan until the end of September, organisers said. There were no reports of the kind of chaotic scenes seen when scarce tickets went on sales for last year's Beijing Olympics.
The sheer scale of Shanghai's Expo and its six-month duration -- from May 1 to October 31 next year -- means there should be plenty of tickets to go round, organisers said. Yuan Changping, 59, was one of the first to buy tickets at China Mobile's flagship store in downtown Shanghai, buying 50 opening day tickets for cancer patients. "Expo is a chance to see the most advanced technology and the glamorous new life that awaits us. That can inspire hope and a longing to survive," Yuan, a cancer survivor himself, told AFP after buying his tickets. He said he wanted to buy as early as possible because he expected tickets for the opening day to sell out quickly. A few people behind him stood Kyle Gordon, a 20-year-old Harvard student, who said he did not know about Expo before coming to Shanghai for a summer job. "I soon found out it was a very big deal," the Boston native said. "With all the build-up and seeing everything come together, I'm definitely interested in coming back next summer."
The public had their first chance to buy tickets on Wednesday, but more than three million tickets have been sold since group sales began in March, the Expo Bureau said.