Metro Commute

I changed jobs.  I'm working for an internet startup on the edge of Shanghai.  The office is in a "villa" in the Pudong District. It's a beautiful building with a garden in a closed gate community.  The only drawback is that it takes an hour on the subway and a shuttle bus ride to get to the house.

Outside the villa.

At rush  hour the subways are crowded body to body, like sardines in a can.  It is not comfortable, but on hot days it is even worse, or on rainy days when more people take the subway.  The Chinese know how to push to get the last possible person onto the train.  So you know why they have problems with people getting trampled or suffocated at holidays with big crowds.

There is the MetroTV screen playing advertisements and news clips in each car, and it is a little bit of distraction from the discomfort.  A lot of what they show is advertisements for  the Metro itself.  You see lines of people getting onto the subways and crowds of people standing on the subways, and streams of people pushing their way through the crowds to get off.  And you wonder why the Metro would bother to show you these pictures, because you are living this everyday, and you don't need to see more of it.  Of course some of it is how to act, what you can and can't do, and what to do in an emergency. Sigh! At least they are trying to improve the crowd etiquette.

Then, after a while you begin to think of the hundreds of thousands, millions really, of people being transported across the city daily to start their jobs in the morning.  It begins to make you feel like you are part of something bigger.  The big working of a machine of one of the worlds largest cities, a financial center of a growing economy.  Maybe you feel a little proud to be a little part of the whole.

But that wears off too after a while.  I turn on my music and put in my earphones and watch the people and the subway stations going by like on a travel movie, disinterestedly, or romantically, or thoughtfully, watching time and people pass.

The "Library" at the villa.

I'll be glad when the office moves into the city center.  It will cut the commute time from an hour and a half to, maybe, half an hour.  I will have  a life again and be able to do things in the evening besides just come home and sleeping.

But I'll miss the private garden and the "home cooked" meals at the villa.

The gardens and patio.

But maybe the office building will have some of these things also.

Greetings from Shanghai,

Ann Elliott