About City Sounds

Away from home, once again.  Cars are riding their horns down below the 12^th floor of the residence I’m staying in.  Urban sounds that rise and receded with every traffic light.  Horns are like birdcalls that come randomly while the pulsation of traffic flow, is governed by lights and the rising tide of morning time traffic. Something deeply familiar about city sounds, but distant as well.

Overcast outside but it doesn’t look polluted.  Shanghai is almost always moist.  And moisture is forgiving.  I tried to remind my daughters about what Taoism was when we were on the holy Taoist peak last weekend, through the use of the few aphorisms I could recall:  Water is stronger than stone because it can wear down stone over time.  So we’ll think of moisture as strength, as well.

The last time I stayed here I think I heard a subway or similarly deep and regular run against the foundation of this building, every so often.  But that was down on the fifth floor, closer to the girders that run down into the bedrock.  Up here on the twelfth floor the vibrations don’t seem to register.  Though perhaps it is because I’m all the way down on the east side of the building, much further from the elevator. 

I never used to know my sense of direction in Shanghai. In Manhattan, east and west is pretty straightforward.  In Beijing its all squares radiating out from the emperor's throne.  During my first stint here, there was no “Pu Dong” neighborhood of any consequence.  Once you define the city as east and west of the river, as they do now it becomes easier.   And at this residence, we conveniently have a ‘Beijing Road’ running along the north side of the building.  Other neighborhoods, away from the river, away from the main arteries, I am lost, once again.