On short term memory and

[yaramaz]

The sun has reared its sunny head and inexplicably Shanghai is suddenly warming up and brightening up. I should note as a reminder that just two days ago we were having intermittent blizzards throughout the day. Coming home after sleepy after-work cocktails with Koan on Tuesday night at Tara 57 at the embassy end of Fuxing Lu, I hopped in a cab just as it started yet another 5 minute whiteout. At one corner on Wulumuqi Lu, a young boy came out of his family's shoebox veggie shop and stood at the edge of the sidewalk staring up at the swirling flakes, with one hand casually tucked into his unzipped tracksuit bottoms to aim his nonchalant stream of dreamy pee away from the taxi wheels. By the time I got home, the blizzard (and it was indeed a blizzard) was finished. Any dustings of snow that had stuck quickly melted and the skies parted as if nothing had happened. Shanghai is always in a hurry. It has a short memory.

Comments

[redsnake05]

It's true. Shanghai seemed to me, when I was there, to be a very restless city. My friend and I stayed at a backpackers that used to be a colonial five star hotel. It had high ceilings and echoing floors and seemed fit for ghosts. Even then, it was an uneasy aging process, like it would be bulldozed any moment.

[yaramaz]

Yes. I find it utterly disorienting when whole city blocks I walked down last month are now razed; or a bank I used to pay my rent at is suddenly a restaurant (where is my bank?); or a whole new freaking STREET appears where there was none yesterday. Anything old is seen as either worthless and unprofitable (raze it without a second thought and build a hi-rise) or it is deemed worthy and profitable but only if a developer buys it all up and boots out the low-rent inhabitants and brings in a Hong Kong architect to turn it into a trendy shopping plaza (see Xintiandi, for example, or hell, a lot of Old Town)