The Neighborhood

I live in a very nice, two bedroom apartment on the eleventh floor of an apartment building that is one of a cluster of fourteen story buildings in a “gated” community. Four to six security guards keep watch at two entrances on adjoining streets. It’s as big as the two bedroom apartment I had at Longfellow Apartments in Boston, which was a few steps away from the Boston Garden, North Station and the Esplanade. I pay 5,000 RMB per month rent, which is about $770 a month. My school pays about RMB 3,800 as a monthly housing allowance toward that, after tax. That rent in Shanghai compares to the nearly $3,000 a month I paid in Boston in 2002 for a similar two-bedroom apartment. Utilities here are about $40 a month in dollars and my Internet/Cable TV connections cost 150 RMB a month which is about the same as $25.

Like most city living, it’s convenient. The subway, one of eleven subway lines weaving around Shanghai, is five minutes away; a fresh food and vegetable market is ten minutes on foot. Five or six dry cleaner/laundries are within two blocks in each direction. There are more than a dozen restaurants within the same two blocks including a Pizza Hut (considered “high-end” in China), and a KFC. At night there are street vendors selling all kinds of stuff including movies for eighty-five cents per DVD; fruit and vegetables and some who set up small cafes with portable tables and stoves or woks all transported on three-wheeled bicycles or carts.

Right near the subway entrance and the Pizza Hut, across the street (Kongjiang Lu) from the KFC is a large department and food store like a smaller version of but not Walmart which has about anything not available at smaller local shops or from street vendors. Three bakeries are close by one of which makes croissants as good as any in Paris. Each one costs about forty cents.

The entrance to my building and the adjacent buildings open on an inner courtyard and drive – an underground garage accommodates most of the cars here. There are two apartments per floor and one elevator which goes at a little less than one second per floor. The backside of the my building and the adjacent building fronts on the street and the first floor on the street side have a variety of shops and services. Mine has two foot massage places, a small whorehouse, a “medical” service where old people sit for hours with alligator clips on fingers and nostrils and various wraps on their arms legs and heads with wires leading to little electronic boxes that do nothing. Apparently the psychological effects are profound as these places are all over. Young workers offer free blood pressure taking and then persuade the gullible to go inside and get wired up to one of these things.

The adjacent building has another foot massage place, a shop that sells high-end housewares and decorations. an auto-shop where people are always cleaning and washing cars on the sidewalk spraying water all over and a “massage” place where men can get attention, but no overt sex from a bevy of almost-over-the-hill girls who sit around all day waiting to perform your-clothes-stay-on rubbing and touching under the guise of a massage that seems to take the edge off a lot of Chinese men with no or inadequate female attention. I’ve never seen one of these places for women. Guys pay about six bucks an hour or so.

My own foot massage place where I go at least once a week is two blocks away too, flanked by a bicycle shop, a bank and other foot massage places. I get the ninety minute foot massage treatment from the same woman and with a healthy tip, I pay about twelve dollars. I bought a ten-speed bike at the shop next door a few weeks ago, a Chinese brand called Phoenix, with Shimano gears and brakes, for seventy bucks. I’ve got a good bike in the States, but it would cost me considerably more than that to ship it.

My bank at which I can use the ATM to move money to anybody who gives me their account number and name is five minutes away. That includes my rent, which in China is paid in three-month chunks, in advance. When you first rent a place in China you fork over four months rent when you sign the lease which includes the security deposit. If you are not expecting it. there’s some serious sticker shock when arranging accommodations. I can pay my utility bills at almost any Seven-Eleven-type store with cash. My barber (a real one) is just down the street and most times there is no waiting and the haircut costs about $2.00, which is twice as much as my late Uncle Mike Spisso charged in Poughkeepsie when I was a kid. Within two blocks there are four fresh fruit markets which carry a lot of things I know like bananas, peaches, grapes and pears (the so-called “Asian pears” that are huge and delicious), plus a lot of fruits I never heard of or saw before. They come from all over the world including a lot of Kiwi fruit which for some reason are very popular.

My apartment opens to the Southwest with two big windows and an enclosed balcony. The balcony is where laundry gets hung to dry, rather than in most Chinese apartments where it hangs out the windows and balconies and anything else able to hold wet laundry. I look out on the rooftops of many apartment buildings, across to my school and to Yangpu Bridge one of several crossings and tunnels that connect the Puxi side of Shanghai with the Pudong side which are dissected by the Huangpu River. From my apartment I can also see the big tower with the balls on it, the Oriental Pearl Tower all lit up at night and the Shanghai World Finance Center, the bigger skyscraper that is blue and looks like a building with a large handle on top of it.

Directly below my balcony, eleven stories below, is the entrance to the “red-light” establishment which while it doesn’t have a red light, does have a few past-their-prime women and occasionally a startling young beauty whose virtue is available for about $15. Before noon, this place and others like it (there must be nearly a dozen within three blocks), are shuttered with heavy curtains. After noon, until God knows when, they are open with assorted practitioners sitting around, some of whom are attired in uniforms while others are in lingerie or street clothes depending on the predilections of the owners/operators. They watch TV, work on elaborate cross stitch projects, play games on their mobile phones or sleep. So many people wander around the streets in pajamas, its hard to tell sometimes if they are working girls going on an errand or just a neighbor following local tradition.

There are buses all over, most of which operate via overhead electrical lines like trolleys. The others run on natural gas so you rarely see a belching bus spewing black diesel fumes. Taxis are all over too, almost all of them are VW Santanas. The meter starts now at RMB14, up from 12, just over $2. Yesterday, I traveled seventeen kilometers, a little over ten miles and my taxi fare was RMB 63 which is just under $10. Taxis are expensive when compared to the subway or bus, but a lot cheaper than any place in the States. They’re easy to get, but flagging down a taxi in China is a little different than in the States. In New York for example, people stand roadside with their hand raised, waving at taxis. In China people stand roadside, but their hand is down, slightly away from their body, still waving a little, but more like an underhand toss than an overhand throw.

Shanghai has two airports and three train stations. They’re all huge. All are connected by direct subway lines which is more than you can say for any city in America. One line, the No.2 Line, connects Pudong Airport with Hongqiao – kind of like Kennedy and Laguardia respectively, except each is on steroids. Hangqiao (hang -chow) also serves as a high-speed rail terminal. I took the high-speed train from Beijing to Shanghai in August. I left Beijing’s South Station at 11:30 AM and arrived in Shanghai just before 3 PM. the distance between Shanghai and Beijing is 1070 kilometers or about 660 miles. My train traveled just over 300 KM per hour for most of the trip, made two stops in between and my ticket cost about $85.

I teach at two schools, both within easy walking distance and the shortest path is via a bog public park (Yangpu Park). The park is always crowded. In the mornings its filled with older people doing slow motion Chinese exercises, sometimes costumed, sometimes with fans or even swords, often accompanied by music played on portable players. During the day, kite flyers take over the meadows, fishermen line the ponds and in-between singers match their skills with portable karaoke players that include TV screens and speakers most powered by car batteries on carts. Other parts of the park (and many parking lots and street corners at night) are filled with ball-room dancing couples, again accompanied by portable music machines, all dancing in stylized, formal (not to say “rigid”), postures – men with women, women with women, and people just twirling around by themselves. The paved areas near the KFC and subway entrance in my neighborhood are particularly popular nocturnal locations for the local version of dancing UNDER the stars.

But that’s China and that’s my neighborhood.

Quack Device used to fleece gullible old people.

Weekend Group Exercise, Yangpu Park

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