Tallest Building in Town

What do you do during the Mid-Autumn Festival?  It doesn’t even feel like Autumn’s properly begun but OK, as per the name, we're already in the middle of the season.  The Mrs wanted to head out this evening, take in the city, invoke a bit of celebration.  All good.  She decides we'll all heading to the tallest building in town in honor of the day.  It's not my holiday, so I don't have much to say.  "Yes.  I want to go to that building, look out at the city and have a drink."  And so it shall be. 

This top floor restaurant, the eightieth floor of China World Three, is a dull, predictable place for dining.  An alluring magazine menu suggests an overpriced room-service selections.  But the drinks are fine and the view is, for now, one of the best in the capital.  Across the street we have the audacious new “Respect,” tower of Zun.  Our cab driver told us it was supposedly going to be the biggest new tower in the world.  That’s the first I’ve heard that.  “Yes, it’s only half done. It will be twice that height.”  If that is the case and it still has another hundred floors to go, that will be remarkable.  And odd.  (In fact, upon completion there will still be at least seven other buildings taller than the Zun tower.  And while the "zun" is the same zun as respect: 尊 the reference seems to be to that character's original meaning of wine vessel.)

I manage to talk my wife out of the reservation she'd made at an overpriced hotel duck restaurant two exits up the ring road.  Let's go into the old city.  I'd just eaten a farm to table joint near De Sheng Men just the other night and it was fabulous.  Slowly, patiently, I am able to steer things in that direction.  Crosstown traffic?  Not during the holiday.  Driving is merciful and soon we're hooking around the second ring road, spinning about the clover leaf of the imposing De Sheng Men tower.  I want them to see the lake with the moon and soon it's before us at the far end of Hou Hai.

Over dinner I asked my wife about her own memories of Mid Autumn festival from when she was young.  She recalled the story of her uncle who returned from Shanghai for the holiday, so concerned that the kids might steal the moon cakes that he hung them up on the wall where they stayed for more than a year, while the oil in the cakes leaked and stained the wall.  There they remained, up on the wall, away from the kids.  My daughters rolled their eyes when I push for more.  I always do this.  But I didn’t grow up with moon cakes.  And stories are all they'll ever have of that world that wont be there when they look for it.

Wednesday, 10/04/17