The same real estate
agent, David, met me at our serviced apartment early Monday morning with a
spreadsheet of apartment listings for my viewing. He gave me the sheet and I
wondered what I was meant to do with the pages of Chinese script? Our driver
Mr. Sheng was also waiting outside the building, a cloud of smoke surrounding
him and a pile of cigarette butts at his feet. Mr. Sheng’s three words of
English coupled with our two words of Mandarin led to a conversation that
consisted of an inordinate amount of bowing, clapping and smiling.
In normal circumstances, only
the rich and famous have a full-time chauffeur but in many emerging markets,
hiring a driver for a manager is actually a strategic decision on the part of a
multi-national company. In this way their staff is protected from car
accidents, thefts and potential lawsuits. Anybody who spends a day in Shanghai
- where 95% of the traffic signs are written in Chinese, 80% of the people
ignore traffic signs and another 20% do not understand them, and 87% of people
drive as if they had overdosed or a speed-crack combination - quickly
understands how practical, rather than decadent, it is for a foreigner to
engage a fulltime chauffeur.
As we drove through
neighborhoods, I was tossed from one side of the care to the next as Mr. Sheng
swerved away from oncoming traffic, bicyclists, people, and a lone vegetable
wagon. The congestion was especially intense at crossroads; as people rivaled one
another for passage, I could see smoke rising from their feet as they scraped the
pavement in preparation for a light change. The rules of engagement on the road
were absolutely foreign to me - cars forced their way into bicycle lanes,
weaved in between lanes without signaling, mopeds drove on the sidewalks and
bicycles passed by the dozens, almost as if they were all attached by an
invisible wire. Since cars did not stop
at pedestrian cross walks, people ran across in absolute terror and desperation,
tossing baby strollers to the other side of the road.
In an interesting twist, while
taxi drivers wear white gloves when driving, they also spit from their open car
window at every opportunity. The overdose of stimuli from the city streets was reminiscent
of a science fiction film and quite dizzying.
I closed my eyes to rest them from the flashing advertisements and
covered my ears to drown out the constant honking and blasting radio.
David took me to see six
apartments but each was less appropriate than the last. Before entering the
first apartment I was asked to remove my shoes and was given a pair of filthy
dog-eared pink Hello Kitty slippers. I obliged – throwing away my socks later –
and shuffled behind the real estate and his entourage of 6 who had appeared at
the building. Most apartments came with built-in furniture modules and well, I
could not see myself living with a glitzy painted chandeliers or life sized
tiger sculptures. I mean, the latter would be hard to hide in a cupboard. One
apartment was quite lovely but it was located in a big-mac-sized modern complex
that consisted of dozens of towers. How would I orient myself in this maze of identical
flats? I was quite enamored by a traditional 4-story high lane house in the
French Concession but I knew that Andy would never agree to meander though the
narrow passageways, pushing away the neighbor’s hanging laundry and stepping
over the turtles being sold by the neighbor to get to our house.
And no, the turtles are
not sold as pets.
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