Missing presumed useless
There are many strange things to be seen in Shanghai, and I have written about many of them already. What is just as interesting though, are the things you DON’T see. As I have said before, there are 15 million people living in Shanghai. How come I have never seen a skip, a bin-man, or even a rubbish bin? Where do all these people put their rubbish? I don’t even know where our rubbish goes. We put it all in miniature black bags, such as you might line a pedal bin with. Several times a day, the Ayi takes it to the end of the drive and leaves it under a tree. Then it just disappears. You might think then, that the streets of Shanghai would be lined with a daily quota of at least 10 million tiny little bin bags, all stacked up under trees, waiting to magically disappear. But they aren’t.
Cotton wool balls. They’re something else that don’t exist here. I spent at least a month looking for them, and in the end realized that the only alternative available was those little flat white cotton discs. I think it must be a question of space. There is no space in Shanghai, and certainly no space for ridiculously enormous cloud-like bags of puffy cotton wool, when it is obviously far more sensible to compress them and flatten them to the depth of 1mm and then put them in a tube. And caravans. Not a single caravan. I suppose that living in a space of 8ft by 15ft, cooking on two rings, sleeping on a plywood mattress and swaying in the wind loses some of its appeal when you live like that normally anyway. Granted, if you were at home, you would be doing it on the 29th floor, but at least you don’t have to trek across a field to go to the toilet.
And roundabouts. Plenty of zebra crossings (to be ignored), traffic lights (to be ignored), and road junctions (to be ignored), but no roundabouts. Although, having said that, I did see one tiny roundabout here once. It was in the middle of the extremely complicated car park of the Regal International Hotel. I can only imagine that someone in Hotel Planning (Car Parks Division) had recently watched a TV program on Milton Keynes, and decided that installing a roundabout might be a good way of making the British feel at home. Charley drove straight over it.
Cotton wool balls. They’re something else that don’t exist here. I spent at least a month looking for them, and in the end realized that the only alternative available was those little flat white cotton discs. I think it must be a question of space. There is no space in Shanghai, and certainly no space for ridiculously enormous cloud-like bags of puffy cotton wool, when it is obviously far more sensible to compress them and flatten them to the depth of 1mm and then put them in a tube. And caravans. Not a single caravan. I suppose that living in a space of 8ft by 15ft, cooking on two rings, sleeping on a plywood mattress and swaying in the wind loses some of its appeal when you live like that normally anyway. Granted, if you were at home, you would be doing it on the 29th floor, but at least you don’t have to trek across a field to go to the toilet.
And roundabouts. Plenty of zebra crossings (to be ignored), traffic lights (to be ignored), and road junctions (to be ignored), but no roundabouts. Although, having said that, I did see one tiny roundabout here once. It was in the middle of the extremely complicated car park of the Regal International Hotel. I can only imagine that someone in Hotel Planning (Car Parks Division) had recently watched a TV program on Milton Keynes, and decided that installing a roundabout might be a good way of making the British feel at home. Charley drove straight over it.
posted by Linda at 8:09 AM
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