The drilling started from the edge of unconsciousness and with the first dim thought I knew the construction workers have begun their day. Why do they need the drilling for the mere task of dusting up the building? Later I found out it’s for the installing of new cases for the air-con every house has hanging out of their window – so if we don’t have World Expo, are we going to have all the air-cons flying and falling over the heads of pedestrians?
As nice as it is to know my air-con is not going to fly away, I don’t like to have my building walled up with rusty iron pipes and roofed with bamboo-woven boards and I don’t like to have construction workers dangling out of my window on their thick ropes. And I certainly don’t like to be woken up on a weekend morning at seven.
In name of the World Expo 2010, the city of Shanghai has entered into a frenzy of universal construction, as if it’s not already one huge construction site. Literally every building, as long as it can be seen from the streets, has to be dusted up and painted anew to show our best to the world. The standard coup is to wall up the building with the pre-historic type of scaffolding, namely rusty iron pipes screwed into each other to give the structure and dirty bamboo-woven boards as floors for workers to walk upon. From where they would engage themselves endlessly in the mysterious scrubbing and scraping which is supposed to leave the building cleaner and prettier; sometimes dirty waters would be streaming down from the bamboo roofs so you know they are bathing the walls. The sheer amount of noise, dirt, traffic inconvenience they created in the process so overwhelms the comically hopeful good results that the locals already changed the slogan of Expo 2010 from the official “Better City, Better Life” to the more appropriate “Messier City, Worse Life”.
The sheer scale of such work, with building-cleaning only a little part and the most visible one, makes one wonder how much of our lovely GDP figure arrives in this fashion of waste of economic and social resource and how much of our tax money is laundried into back-pocket through it. Thanks God we’re indeed such a huge economy that we could even afford such a level of inefficiency.
I don’t find my building much prettier now so far, but of course they have not taken away the scaffoldings, when they eventually do, as reluctantly as they might feel, I hope they would take away the garbage too. There is one shining point, I mean, literally – you know the kind of short iron bars everyone has out of their window as an old fashioned way of laundry-drying - you might already forget about it because most people are not using them anymore nowadays anyway – they have painted them silver and they’re actually shining in the good weather!
Now that’s something to be said for the Shanghai government, the most progressive one among their league as some contend, they really respect our rights and the old fashioned-way of laundry drying – because my Guangzhou colleague told me, after hearing my complaint about the mess in Shanghai that, the city of Guangzhou, in a separate frenzy in preparation for the Asia Game 2010, has not only the same amount of mess going on, but they have taken away the residents’ old-fashioned laundry-drying iron-bar when they’re not at home!
And if you ask when are all these craziness going away for this round? I just checked out the “Construction Notice” board out of my building, under the apology for the “inconvenience our restoration work cause you”, it stated civilly that the project is projected to be finished on Apr 31st, a good effort to make for the official grand opening of World Expo on May 1st, 2010.
As nice as it is to know my air-con is not going to fly away, I don’t like to have my building walled up with rusty iron pipes and roofed with bamboo-woven boards and I don’t like to have construction workers dangling out of my window on their thick ropes. And I certainly don’t like to be woken up on a weekend morning at seven.
In name of the World Expo 2010, the city of Shanghai has entered into a frenzy of universal construction, as if it’s not already one huge construction site. Literally every building, as long as it can be seen from the streets, has to be dusted up and painted anew to show our best to the world. The standard coup is to wall up the building with the pre-historic type of scaffolding, namely rusty iron pipes screwed into each other to give the structure and dirty bamboo-woven boards as floors for workers to walk upon. From where they would engage themselves endlessly in the mysterious scrubbing and scraping which is supposed to leave the building cleaner and prettier; sometimes dirty waters would be streaming down from the bamboo roofs so you know they are bathing the walls. The sheer amount of noise, dirt, traffic inconvenience they created in the process so overwhelms the comically hopeful good results that the locals already changed the slogan of Expo 2010 from the official “Better City, Better Life” to the more appropriate “Messier City, Worse Life”.
The sheer scale of such work, with building-cleaning only a little part and the most visible one, makes one wonder how much of our lovely GDP figure arrives in this fashion of waste of economic and social resource and how much of our tax money is laundried into back-pocket through it. Thanks God we’re indeed such a huge economy that we could even afford such a level of inefficiency.
I don’t find my building much prettier now so far, but of course they have not taken away the scaffoldings, when they eventually do, as reluctantly as they might feel, I hope they would take away the garbage too. There is one shining point, I mean, literally – you know the kind of short iron bars everyone has out of their window as an old fashioned way of laundry-drying - you might already forget about it because most people are not using them anymore nowadays anyway – they have painted them silver and they’re actually shining in the good weather!
Now that’s something to be said for the Shanghai government, the most progressive one among their league as some contend, they really respect our rights and the old fashioned-way of laundry drying – because my Guangzhou colleague told me, after hearing my complaint about the mess in Shanghai that, the city of Guangzhou, in a separate frenzy in preparation for the Asia Game 2010, has not only the same amount of mess going on, but they have taken away the residents’ old-fashioned laundry-drying iron-bar when they’re not at home!
And if you ask when are all these craziness going away for this round? I just checked out the “Construction Notice” board out of my building, under the apology for the “inconvenience our restoration work cause you”, it stated civilly that the project is projected to be finished on Apr 31st, a good effort to make for the official grand opening of World Expo on May 1st, 2010.
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