With less than a week to go before the 2010 World Expo opens in Shanghai, 175proof.com received preview tickets to visit the site this past weekend. This is just one of those things on my bucket list, including watching U2 in concert, go shark diving and make a pilgrimmage to the Muchen Oktoberfest (which we will be this September!)

On Saturday, I made my way down to the Shanghai Expo site in Pudong with a friend who uses words “Awesome! Great! Fab!” to describe just about anything. Well, I’ll borrow those words to describe the Expo because it truly was such.

As it’s still a preview, more than half of the paviliions were not open and whatever was open had a queue line of 2-4hours to enter. Fortunately, I had friends working there which came with privileges…

The official Expo beer is Budweiser and even then, I only found one tiny Bud shop selling beer cans with me being the only patron. The beer babe made it clear that local Chinese don’t really drink during the day and this was validated when most people came into the shop thinking it was selling Coke!

Not being a fan of the industrial American beers, my taste buds were vindicated when I visited the German pavilion and saw a bar serving Hofbräu-Festzelt which is also served at Munich Beer House we reviewed previously, read it here.