Expo 86 still shines after 24 years

With the world's eyes on Vancouver, Canada the past two weeks during the 2010 Winter Olympics, it's seen a thriving multicultural metropolis with gleaming skyscrapers and excellent infrastructure - a city studied by urban planners worldwide.

Viewers can be forgiven for not realizing that much of what they're seeing is the proud legacy of Expo 86. The city that hometown author Douglas Coupland dubbed "The City of Glass" owes much of its legacy to five and half months in the summer of 1986, when it hosted a world's fair under the theme "World in Motion, World in Touch".

As a 19-year-old in 1986, this is how I first experienced Vancouver, a city I immediately fell in love with. As a college student in Atlanta (another city that would see its own Olympics), I'd saved my money and found the cheapest flight and hotel I could. There was no way I was going to miss an Expo that would feature the United States, the People's Republic of China, and the Soviet Union together for the first time in North America.