A man drunkenly takes off his shirt while standing on a elevated platform and begins spinning it over his head in a wild fashion. He gets a few cheers and hoots from the people standing nearby, but most don’t look too impressed. “Wow,” says one woman, taken aback by the topless man. “He must have been stamping passports all day.”

“Really?” another asks.

“I don’t know,” she admits. “But that’s what I would be doing right now if I had been stamping those passports for the past eight hours.”

Underneath the roof of the Switzerland pavilion, staff members from various pavilions still around in the Expo grounds are enjoying alcoholic beverages and music. It’s past 1 a.m. Most are just mingling around, and the scene seems reminiscent of a bunch of high schoolers drinking in a public park.

The Switzerland party occurred more than a month ago, and since then the Expo has exploded with pavilion parties for staff members working inside the grounds, everything from regular events at the Malta and Angola pavilions to more over the top events such as the Finland pavilion’s sauna party — yes, the pavilion has a sauna in the VIP lounge — and the Belgium pavilion’s faux rave.

It now seems the Shanghai Expo is starting to see more pavilions host parties — Russia, Czech Republic, Chile, Columbia and at least a half-dozen other pavilions — an alternative nightlife to what one sees in the rest of the city in the name of having a good time.

The hub for these parties is Expo Nights, an unofficial Web site that collects information on upcoming nightlife events at the Expo as well as photographs from the parties. Billed as the “parties where Haibao doesn’t go,” Expo Nights has managed to put together a very comprehensive calendar for upcoming parties inside pavilions, and the Web site, rather provocatively, purports to explain what happens after all the “sank you for your cOOperation” — mimicking the Chinese security guard’s phonetic pronunciation of “thank you for your cooperation” — is over.

Much of the parties held at pavilions are not open to the public. This speaks to the reasons for these events: letting off some steam. With so many staff members putting in full days at the Expo, making sure attendees are moving through lines and exhibits in an orderly fashion, smiling, being constantly asked to have their pictures taken, guiding tours for VIPs and delegations, it is no wonder they want parties. It gets overlooked that these staffs don’t have time to enjoy other parts of Shanghai, let alone China, for their time here at the Expo. They are stuck at the Expo, and with the amount of hours they’re putting in, it makes sense that nightlife would also take place inside the Expo grounds.

This can lead to some more immature behavior by a crowd of people teaming to go wild every once and awhile. At the recent Belgium pavilion party, attendees were handed balloon sticks — very phallic looking balloons. What happens when a few hundred people are given an inflated object that looks like whiffle ball bat? For five minutes, the only thing one could hear were the sounds of people whacking each other with balloons until every last one had been popped.

Two of the more notable parties at the Expo are also the backbone to nightlife inside the grounds. The Malta and Angola pavilions host events every Tuesday and Thursday, respectively. They’ve been the only two pavilions to regularly hold parties since the start of the Expo in May.

These events give pavilion staff personnel the chance to enjoy themselves, and in the coming four months, there are only going to be more pavilions getting involved.