Did the Expo 2010 really impart such a good impression of Shanghai to (foreign) visitors? Did it (and the whole city, to some extent, during the event) not just seem like an overcrowded, overhyped fairground to many of them? Though I would have to admit, organising such an enormous event in such a bustling, dense, crowded city is a logistical challenge par excellence, and the organising committee did not too bad at all a job. Also possibly foreigners were generally treated more kindly, since there were so few of them, and they were guests after all.
Whether or not such positive impressions were unrepresentative and misleading, though, they can't be a bad thing, and there's some truth to them anyway. Shanghai is now indeed a much cleaner and neater place with a lot more useful infrastructure than it was, or would have been by now without the Expo. And if what the visitors saw was only the city and country putting its best foot forward---well so much the better for us, no? Just another reason why the six-month long, agonisingly disruptive spectacle wasn't just another shiny toy in town, but was actually useful.
It's like "nothing ventured, nothing gained" writ Large.
In other news, my second language mother tongue other first language is rapidly fading into nada. Pfft.
