Shanghaied and one of many

Here we are in the far out north west suburb of Shanghai which, Fredi tells me, is older than Shanghai itself. I am finding it very good in a way I would never have anticipated. Most of the buildings are high rise - twenty storeys or so, including this one.  We are on the fifteenth floor and the flat itself, like all the others, is a cross section of the tall slice that is the building. At one end of it is a little glass room for washing with a clothes drying rack that extends into the void outside. Fred has planted a box of parsley by the washing machine . I am sitting by it with the sun flooding in and tiny cars are beetling about below with hardly any sound.  It is apparently a good pollution day with the purple grey mist only beginning behind the buildings across the wasteland immediately below us.

By conventional standards it would be an ugly landscape but I can't help appreciating the way it has been shaped to accommodate all of us humans in our cubes.  Out on the other side of this apartment is a huge grey flat wall broken up by countless little windows. A woman is beating a mat at one and there are splashes of colour and washing at others and the awareness that every single unit  contains a configuration of people just as real as us moves me.

Nature is not much in evidence from this window.  The road below has bare trees on either side  and up the middles and the surrounding wasteland is covered in brown scrub with the occasional fluoro  outburst of some weird vegetation.  It is more moony than earthly.

What is it that, at least for the moment makes me feel peaceful and free? Maybe just for now I find my individualist self in abeyance and I am enjoying the feeling of being one of many.