![]() ![]() The sun, if visible at all, seems dimmer than the full moon on a hazy night. Don’t breathe! The air is smelly with garbage juice. ![]() The assorted finials on the tops of skyscrapers will make you think of a bottle opener, a Jell-O mold, a crown roast, a bamboo steamer, a chuppah, a Möbius strip, a snake that’s swallowed some golf balls, the Eiffel Tower, Lady Liberty’s headpiece, and the spiny back of a stegosaurus. Shanghai has the world’s fastest intra-city train, largest skateboard park, longest laundry chute (running from the Hyatt hotel’s eighty-seventh floor to its basement), and, based on my observations, the least number of seat belts. In its place, here comes a high-rise rising higher than the one put up yesterday, a clothesline and an illegal satellite dish poking out from each window (a twenty-eight-hundred-square-foot four-bedroom, four-bathroom rental at the luxurious Richgate: $8,572 a month). Blink, and another lane lined with hundred-year-old _shikumen-_each a home to handfuls of families-is bulldozed. Things move fast in this town which is both new and old, Western and Eastern, Adidas and Adidos, Adadis, Admimas, Daiads, and Odidoss. New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Shanghai doesn’t even sit down, and not just because there is no room. ![]()
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