[rescued from February 8, 2007]
Things have been pretty busy of late- Monday I spent looking around, and finally making a decision on, apartments. Although I did have a place picked out a while ago, some financial monkery and the fact that I think I would be better off travelling to work on the Metro/Maglev means I’ve changed where I want to live.
Now it just remains to be seen whether I can get it together to move in before the Chinee New Year holiday (Feb 18 onwards) when everything shuts down for at least a week.
Looking around one apartment building, there was a street next to it with a great spread of restaurants, bars and basically everything you could want. Here’s a (pirate) DVD shop for example:
Movie World, Dagu Road
What could be better than that?
Directly opposite, Dagu Road
When I get back to England, I’m opening up a shop called “Harrods Is Wank”
The whole apartment situation is a bit weird actually- they seem to be grouped into collections of 10 or so 35+ storey tower blocks, with a clubhouse (Gym, bar etc.) and a bit of a communal garden in the middle to walk around. These complexes have slightly odd names like Top Of City or La Doll.
Each apartment is then owned by someone who has decorated it to their ‘taste’- often in a European style involving tasseled cushions and violins mounted on the wall. So although I’ve looked about 10 places in all, a lot of the time it just meant going to a different floor of the building.
Streets in the sky, I suppose that’s how they pack 20 million people into Shanghai.
Top Of City, Jing-An. (Not the place I picked)
