Friday, January 26, 2007

Where I live


Here's an aerial view of my apartment building. Well, not from very high up, and not of my actual building. It's part of a model of the entire city of Shanghai at the City Planning musuem. But you get the picture. There are seven towers (not connected - read my earlier post about rooftop crossings) that are each 25-30 stories high. I wrote earlier that I live on the 33rd floor, but I actually live on the floor numbered 33. In reality, it's only the 29th story of the building. Thanks to superstition (Chinese and Western), there are no floors numbered 4, 13, 14, 24, or 34. The number 4 sounds like death in Chinese, so those numbers are all taboo. (More to come on Chinese number preferences.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You forgot to note that getting up to the 29th/33rd floor is sometimes a pain. There are 3 elevators, but I never saw them working at the same time. We always got stuck in the scary service elevator with the concave wood floor.

John Chen said...

I bet people like the # 8, 18, 88...? who want to be on 88th Fl? in case of fire?!:-(