By Chris Chang, posted Jun 4, 2010 at 4:26 AM, 813 views,

Visitors Are Out of Control in Shanghai Expo

At Shanghai World Expo, there’s one way to prove you have been to this big event. Get the “expo” passport. This expo passport lets you catalog your experience in the Expo and you can use it to get a commemorative seal. The passport acts as a special souvenir for visitors and you can collect unlimited seals of different countries when visiting Expo pavilions. Out of nowhere, some visitors hold up to 500 expo passports and bring them to the pavilion to get stamps on all these passports. The main reason why the visitors are doing this is because they could make money easy and fast by selling “these passports with stamps included” online.

These rare documents with seals of all participating countries are the most valuable stuff in the Expo. After Shanghai Expo introduced these passports, the Chinese citizens have gone crazy about it. They could make use of this chance to earn some money. According to Apple Daily report, the Expo passport cost $30 Chinese Yuan (about $4), and it’s available for sale at Shanghai Expo stores, service sites, and on-line. After buying it, you can collect stamps provided by corporate and themed pavilions. So, you could get as much stamps as you want and sell the whole set of passport online.

On the online auction sites in China, Expo passports with 200 stamps can be priced at $420 Chinese Yuan (about $60) or above. Also, there’s a service of helping you to collect the stamps and this cost $280 Chinese Yuan (about $40), at least. Lots of deals have been made for this particular service. One of the pavilion staff said that she always provide stamps for 30 passports per minute, with no chance of breathing, and needs to call for backup after an hour. Some of the staff even seen visitors bringing hundreds of passports along to collect stamps.

This crazy habit has caused a great inconvenience for pavilions. The Irish and Norway pavilions have stopped providing the stamps while other pavilions including Canada and Finland have introduced different rules for collecting the stamps. The rules stated as 1 stamp per person or 5 stamps per person. They need to do this to prevent long queues outside pavilions. Since the Shanghai Expo introduced these expo passports, lots of visitors go to the pavilion for the purpose of collecting the stamps, not for taking a tour in it. Moreover, the Australia Pavilion did not arrange a queue up line for visitors and this caused a mess at the stamp office in there.

Well, lots of bad news are coming from the Shanghai World Expo and we can see that the Expo is in a terrible mess. So, are you still interested to go there?

Source: HK Apple Daily