BootsnAll Travel Network



apartment living

by Rachael
Guangzhou, China

China features four times in the top twenty “biggest cities of the world”, and while we won’t be going to number 19 (Shenzhen), we will be visiting numbers 14 and 16 (Shanghai and Beijing), and right now we’re in number 18, Guangzhou, with a population of 12 million.
12 million people. A number I cannot comprehend. When you have so many people in one place, where do they all live? It would seem most of them are in apartment blocks. As far as the eye can see, the entire length of the road is apartment after apartment after apartment after apartment. And when you turn the corner you see more apartments. And more apartments. And still more apartments.

As visitors to this city, we are living away from the tourist hub, in an apartment complex full of yellow faces. On the ground floor are screened rooms with table tennis tables, outside is a communal exercise area, there is a reasonably-stocked super-mini-market and there are manicured gardens inside and outside of the security-monitored gates.

 

This, clearly, is not one of the standard apartments in town – I doubt they all come with a daily cleaning and laundry service – but even still it is far cheaper than staying in a (totally-fiscally-inaccessible-to-us) hotel or even a hostel. Extra bonuses are that no-one is trying to sell us a tour and we don’t have to share the toilet (actually we do have a loo-queue before going out, but we’re not sharing with others as well). We have a kitchen and the novelty of cooking for ourselves – although being in a city renowned for its food, we are going to have to eat out sometime this week! Dumplings are calling.

Not all apartments have views to the city and views to Guangzhou’s main hill. We appreciate that ours does, especially when we consider what these people get to look at each day.

Obviously there’s apartment living and then there’s apartment living.

We observed yesterday that if you had to be poor, it would be preferable to be rurally poor than poor in the city. The rows of drab grey concrete blocks crammed into the streets like sardines in a can would be no match for a mountain vista. But people are flocking to the cities for healthcare (even though they often end up with pollution-induced diseases), education for their children and apparently better housing. I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a man just a week ago about the people who live up on the terraced mountains of Longji.

Man: They have a hard life. They work the old traditional way. It is hard work.
Me: Do they have enough food? Or is there sometimes famine?
Man: Oh, they have food. They grow everything they need.
Me: Then it’s a hard life, but maybe a good life.
Man: Do you think so? (It’s his turn to question)
Then he clarified his position, “It’s a hard life, but not a good one. They even live in wooden houses.”

This makes me wonder if the people living in these concrete cells see them differently to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if they do.



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2 responses to “apartment living”

  1. Gran and Pa says:

    Do not remember seeing that many high rise buildings when we were last there.
    Enjoying the memories.

  2. Gran and Pa says:

    We are having massive rain storm at present. We could go out and sail boats outside. Nice and dry inside though.

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