Vertical Living

It was Saturday morning and I was working on an email about the house project I am working on in Western New York this summer when Zuhua came to my door and informed me that we were going to a friend’s home. I grabbed my camera and off we went to a bus stop around the corner. We rode for a while and got off and made a phone call. In just a few minutes a police van stopped by, picked us up and took us to the friend’s home. It is nice to have friends in high places.

This friend lives on the eighteenth floor, of twenty-four, of a rather large building in a rather large development. The picture below is her building.

Let us back up for a better view.

These building may be wide, but they are real thin to provide windows for the apartments. There is an end view of one off in the distance.

Big buildings with many people, but the grounds are nice.

Where do people park their cars? When you start a project like this you dig one very large hole and truck earth in trucks that are way overloaded to another spot, destroying the streets in the process. This work is done at night when the normal traffic is home sleeping. The hole is filled with one very large parking ramp with the high rises extending toward the heavens in selected locations. Between those high rises several feet of soil is brought back in and placed on top of the parking ramp to provide a base for the park above. You can get many cars into a ramp this size causing real congestion on the streets when they change location. During the summer time it is real nice down there.

At the apartment we had a snack. The girls talked and did girl things and I looked at floor plans in a flyer I happen to pick up showing all the apartment layouts. I looked those over as I listened and watched what two women do when they get together. I live with a Chinese family and learn about the Chinese culture, but I spend time with Zuhua and her friends and learn much about the woman’s world. I really enjoy that. After a couple of hours it was time to go out for lunch. We had a T-bone steak, Chinese style, requiring strong chewing muscles. The place where we went to eat was in an older part of town.

In the foreground is the old that is torn down to make way for the high rises in the background. That is called progress, I think, or is it profit making?