Wednesday, September 11, 2013

"Five a Day" -- A walk down Yanging Road, one fine Saturday in the Fall






1) Shanghai weather can be a bit like New Orleans – hot and humid in the summer, cold and humid in the winter. So basically, it is kind of tropical and plants grow well here.  Shanghai loves flowers and the city uses them as --  well – traffic barricades.  The gorgeous hibiscus was one of hundreds planted in "barricade" planters on Huaihai and Changshu Roads to keep pedestrians from jay walking.  







2)  Yanging Road is bound by Changshu Road on one end and Donghu Road on the other end – both very busy streets.  Somehow Yanging Road is different.  There are times that there is almost no through traffic, except for scooters and bikes. The road hides many different lanes, so there are always lots of people but the scale is uniformly low.  





 
 3)  This is actually a mailbox on one of the 1930s lane houses that line one side of Yanging Road.  I thought the design was lovely.  Hope the rust doesn’t destroy it.  (see the humidity in post #1 above)









4)  I love the greens in this picture -- the ivy, the door, the sign, and even the weed in the sidewalk.   Sometimes a lane house will be beautifully renovated inside, but the outside will look as if the building has been abandoned.  There is no such thing as “curb appeal.” 





5)  The entrance to this building has always interested me.  Building street fronts and the road sometimes have nothing to do with each other.  Roads were built around houses or land was used in a way to maximize space.  While this green building looks like a little cleft of a building, this actually goes back a lot. 

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