Hongkou | Dominik Mayer – Products, Asia, Productivity

It doesn’t only look like war, we also have the sound. There are fireworks about every other day. And they’re only meters away from the houses. I filmed this one yesterday (and it took ages to upload it). A Chinese girl told me that there’ll be a marriage the next day.

They seem to like uniforms here. For me, they all look the same, a bit unreal, like carnival and it’s hard to say if the person in the uniform is a policeman, a parking lot attendant or the member of a private security company. Yesterday we tried to register at the local police station which was very hard to find because it looks like that:

On my way home from school I went through the old Chinese streets when a ranting man walked towards me. One minute later I think I saw the reason for his anger: A truck and a digger that seemed to tear down one of the old houses or clear away the debris. There was so much police around. Twenty persons or more. And a crowd of Chinese people watching. One of them made some signs with his hands as if he wanted me to take a picture. The others looked at me as if I was very welcome and they were eager to find out what I’d do. I thought why not, stepped back a bit and took this picture before a policeman made me leave:

First time in another part of Shanghai. No debris, dirt and construction sites. Instead: Nice streets with trees, little houses and great clubs. We’ve been to four of them.