This is the side gate of the neighborhood that everyone in my city agrees is the most expensive one. I walked past it, took a photo, and then did the thing I always do — went home and looked up the actual numbers. They were stranger than I expected. Short answer: the villas in here
I’ve never really understood how septic tanks work. Ours is just three pits in the ground — three chambers, no moving parts, no pumps. And with a family of five using it every day, I keep coming back to the same question: Won’t it eventually fill up? And if it fills up, then what? Short
I was eating lunch on the pedestrian street the other day when I looked up and saw it again: a building with a flying saucer on the roof. I’d seen this silhouette before — at a hotel restaurant in our town that has two flying saucers sitting on top of it. And now here was
This weekend I went back to the village and walked around. Several of the newly built houses have a small structure sitting on their rooftops — a neat little box, like a tiny house on top of a big one. Ours doesn’t have one, and I found myself staring at them, genuinely puzzled. After asking
Quick answer: yes, it was worth it — and here’s exactly what 80,000 RMB (~USD 11,000) gets you when you install a home elevator in a rural Chinese house, with numbers, not marketing. Our family house in Zhejiang is finally coming together — windows and doors are in, and we just finished installing the elevator.
Next to my neighborhood there’s a driving school. And in the middle of the driving school sits a tower that looks exactly like a flying saucer that landed on a concrete stalk. I’ve seen these towers my whole life. There’s one in almost every Chinese town — an old concrete column with a fat, mushroom-like
I took this photo on a business trip to Russia. The whole side of an apartment building, covered top to bottom in air conditioning units — a hundred of them, maybe more. No balconies on that side. No windows you could climb out of. And I remember standing there thinking: how did anyone get these
Our estate started selling in 2008 — the year of the Beijing Olympics. My family moved in a year later, in 2009. The estate is mostly five- and six-storey buildings; only three towers are above eight floors, and we happen to live in one of them. So we have an elevator. And let me tell
White powdery stains appeared on our new bricks — they wipe off like dust. Harmless, or a warning? Here is what I learned.