Concrete

There's this strange thing about Shanghai (only one, you say?  Hahaha!) that pretty much everything is made out of concrete.  M & I have speculated on the reasons why and think maybe it's so that things don't mold.  It's probably also because it's cheap and plentiful.

Concrete definitely seems to make some construction projects go really quickly (boy can they resurface a road FAST here!), but it also seems to make everything extra noisy.  It seems like just about every building I enter has a tremendous echo, and when you start with a cacophony, that's not a fun or pleasant thing.  It also means things are poorly insulated here.  In the winter, for instance, when I'm out shopping, I really have to dress for the slopes.  In the summer, well, it's better to just not leave my house.

I was able to snap a picture of how things are built here when a good friend of mine sat on this wall and broke it.  (Ok, I wrote it that way for the drama.  It's true, that's what happened, but the construction here is so shoddy - as this particular friend would say - that it's easy to break concrete by sitting on it!)

Also, only the top damage was caused by my friend.  The photo gives us good insight into the building process here: start with brick and cover it with concrete.

Of course cover the brick with concrete!  Who would want brick showing?  Concrete is so much more lovely!  M & I have actually seen walls made of beautiful red-orange brick being covered with concrete as the finishing touch.  Down the street from this particular fiasco (above) there is a new apartment complex being built that isn't actually finished in concrete entirely.  A portion of it is fake brick veneer (probably made from concrete, if I had to guess).  Real bricks are apparently only good underneath.

As an aside, this picture was actually taken at my kids' bus stop.  Nice place to wait for the bus, eh?