Max' apartment

Max' front porch roof garden

Max lives in a tiny apartment with a bath, tiny kitchen with one burner and a sink, and a living room. But the best part is that he has a back door: it leads to a tar beach, covered with potted and trellised gardens of other tenants.

Outside is a parking lot with a long, low building in which lives the bike minder, and tenants' bikes. The security guard has several small water gardens with lilies and fish, and several cages of singing birds. He has a friend who spends the day there and who makes keys, and sometimes a man who does small arc-welding projects. Growing up the sign announcing local rules is a cucumber plant. In China, squash/cucumbers are often coplanted with vining beans, in every available bit of dirt. It is encouraging! There is a produce guy right outside the parking lot on the sidewalk who usually opens up around lunchtime, and a group of men who sit around chatting and drinking tea most of the time outside a teashop, demonstrating the virtues of its product. The street is treelined; about half a block away is a main drag.

Across the street is an apartment building called the Normandy, previously mentioned for its bad feng shui and its ghosts, pictured below. It is an odd combination of Victorian-era buildings (though more recent) connected by  glass breezeways.

About half a block away is a main drag, with chic and everyday shops, and a metro station a couple of blocks up. There are a number of large construction sites within a few blocks. This seems to be the case anywhere in Shanghai and Beijing. There are always many people bustling around. Nevertheless, it is quiet and the air seems fairly clear, because most vehicles are electric buses or subways, or electric bikes or motorbikes like Vespas. Traffic: I was prepared for chaos, but although things like traffic signals are taken with a grain of salt, I only saw one fender-bender. Everyone just kind of goes with the flow and fits in where they need to go. Driving is in no way competitive, no road rage. Still it is astounding how the taxi drivers weave among traffic at speed, and it all works out. It must require a kind of attention and quick reflexes and judgement that would be difficult for me to muster.