The Center, North Side

The guide to Expo 2015 for design lovers. If we say SoHo, everyone thinks of a specific area of Manhattan (or London, if you are British). However, in New York City, SoHo stands for South of Houston Street. Here we are at Expo 2015; we are not as clever as in New York, so we have no SoDe (South of Decumanus). That said, if we organized names like in New York (NoLIta, North of Little Italy; NoMad, North of Madison Square Park, etc.), we would get SoDe. The south side of the matter. Piero Ciampi would have said: “[the roaring south](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F08NeU_97qY)”. This area was curated by the Social Media Team Expo 2015. All photos by Beatrice Bianchetti and Anna Chiara Maggiolini.

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The Flags of Nepal

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The Nepal Pavilion features interesting architecture that generates fascinating, agreeable spaces. The cuisine is great, too: you can eat reasonably exotic things for a very affordable price (without mentioning how nice the staff are). However, there was one thing that we liked immeasurably: being able to buy the colourful prayer flags. This is an important place, because here you can understand how Expo 2015 works. We enter the pavilion intrigued by the architecture. The smell of the food and the friendliness of the cooks invited us to linger. On going to pay, we see these long, long strings with dozens of coloured flags hanging from them. It's explained to us that they're religious flags. We note down these names: bön and Bonpo. On arriving home, Wikipedia opens up a whole world to us! Bön was the ancient Tibetan religion before Buddhism. The Bonpo is the shaman. Each colour has its own precise meaning: Blue symbolizes the sky and the space; White symbolizes the air and the wind; Red symbolizes fire; Green symbolizes water; Yellow symbolizes earth. According to traditional Tibetan medicine, health and wellbeing are the result of balancing the five elements. Wikipedia was just the starter. The next day we return to the pavilion. At this point, the conversation with our Nepalese friends becomes really special and interesting. An interstellar journey using the Metro Red Line. Incredible (in the sense that we'd never have believed it).

The Flags of Nepal
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The Flags of Nepal
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The Flags of Nepal
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The Flags of Nepal
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The Flags of Nepal
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The Flags of Nepal
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The Yoghurt of the JuiceBar

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