Update:  Shower had no hot water this morning.  What a surprise…..

I’ve learned in the past few days that what can be described to me and what something actually is can be two entirely different things.  I’ve come to discover the area in which I am now living has opened my eyes to a new kind of China (or an old kind of China).

Prior to this China trip, I had taken a different set of requirements when seeking a place to live.  When I lived with Kevin Liu, it was the student life, residing just beside Fu Dan University, enjoying loads of restaurants that are geared towards students and teachers.  Lots of very cheap things to do in the area.  But of course the downside was that it wasn’t in the most prime location in Shanghai, so you had to trek a little bit to get to the more touristy areas of Shanghai (which i rarely did anyway).

Next came my 3 bedroom apartments in Zhongtan Rd. and Zhongshan Park.  I was living the high life here.  Fortunately for me, renting an apartment (for 6 months or more) is highly inexpensive.  There is a sense in China that renting is a waste of money.  Also, the process in which you go about renting a place and the rights given to the owners as far as how contracts work, deposits, agent fees and the like make it so complicated that the renting business is hard to make a profit for the property owner.  So most people buy and do not rent, which makes renting prices pretty affordable.  Anyway, these places were awesome, 3 bedrooms, really nice areas, parks, shopping malls close by.  All the essentials that would rarely make me feel isolated.

Now I’m settled into a new apartment in real China, or old China.  Basically the area beside my apartment is of the type that has yet to be demolished.  Of the structures surrounding my high-rise, 50% are actual buildings that were built in the last 20 years but starting to get old (which most buildings 20 years old do in China).  The other 50% are what we in the US would call slums.  They are sort of half buildings, half roofs layered on top of each other.  I can’t tell which are places to live and how they are separated and it’s hard to discern the order in which people live or rent or own.  So we’ve covered the look of this area, its not pleasing to the eye.  That’s fine.

The problem with living in a bustling area like this is that the people living here are all of the same caliber.  If most of the houses are basically slums, then the restaurants in and around the area are going to be servicing the people that live in the slums.  Not the most pleasant thing to think about.  My friend Xiao Liang met me at my apartment to eat lunch yesterday and we had to walk 20 minutes before we found a decent place to eat, which was a cheap Chinese fast food chain and we mostly stopped because we were tired of walking around aimlessly.

The interesting thing about this area though is that I see this area completely different than the girlfriend sees it.  In her eyes, it’s basically like any other place, except its just older, the buildings are getting old.  She finds the biggest difference between living where I used to live and here is that its just newer.

From my perspective though, its way more complicated.  The devil is in the details and when you look more closely, living here introduces a whole new status level that for the most part doesn’t exist so much in newer areas of Shanghai.  For example, walking home yesterday, just across the street from my building, a young child walked out of a small store or restaurant where her parents presumably work, squatted down on the curb and peed right in clear view.  As the pee trickled over the curb and onto the street, she walked back.  You would not see that in newer places.  It’s not to say that this place is disgusting because children pee on the street but its just to show that in newer places, parents probably take a more modern view about how to raise children.  I would hope that if a child did that in nicer places in Shanghai and the parents saw, they would nip it in the bud the first time.  I wonder what my parents would have done if I did that as a child.  Plus, I am not sure whether this child came out of a restaurant which her parents operated or a store.  If it was a restaurant, that makes me pretty uneasy about venturing into one of these small restaurants nearby for the simple fact that if the cook lets their child pee on the street and has no problem with it, what kind of food am I eating?