Friday, September 28, 2007

Shanghai

There's this city, where nothing ever ends. It just goes on forever in circles, a labyrinth, not a cm of space wasted. The city is an example of human failure or people's lack of coherence and managing of space. Your neck hurts from trying to find the horizon, the end of the skyscrapers, the start of a storm, a dawn that is struggling to find the way out of the buildings. The Chinese obsession with the 'bad spirits' that can only walk on earth in a straight row gave way for the Western obsession with modernity whose monstrous architecture flooded the city worse than a tropical storm.
Yet, if you look close enough you can clearly see how nature, no matter how oppressed by concrete it is, always comes back and the Chinese mastery of creating harmony finds its way even on this nightmarish place. There are plants bursting along the highways, small - almost tropical - parks in the midst of the traffic, a garden that shuts out the noise and invites the visitor into a short oblivion from the anxiety that surrounds this puzzled place...

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