The view from our courtyard - the tall building in the back is China World 3, which, at 330 meters, is the tallest building in Beijing.
The building behind the yellow tree is a 60s era apartment building, still occupied, presumably rent-free, or practically so, by its original residents. I always see elderly people sunning themselves just outside, kids with no pants running around on the sidewalks, and when I took this picture after dropping Bella off at school at 8:30 am, I could hear the tic tic tic of a ping pong game coming from their inner courtyard. The only problem? It's sitting in the MIDDLE of a new road that they've built just on the other side of our apartment complex. It makes the road unusable though it has been finished for the past half year or so. Though its days are clearly numbered, for the Olympics, they just gave the building a nice new coat of paint.
While it is a bit of an eyesore in the middle of the shiny, impressive new buildings in the heart of "new-new-new Beijing," and not "historic," like the hutong courtyards that have continuously been chai'd for as long as we've been here, it'll still be a sad day when we wake up to jackhammers and realize that THE last remnant of non-shiny-impressive-new Beijing on our block is finally gone.
The building behind the yellow tree is a 60s era apartment building, still occupied, presumably rent-free, or practically so, by its original residents. I always see elderly people sunning themselves just outside, kids with no pants running around on the sidewalks, and when I took this picture after dropping Bella off at school at 8:30 am, I could hear the tic tic tic of a ping pong game coming from their inner courtyard. The only problem? It's sitting in the MIDDLE of a new road that they've built just on the other side of our apartment complex. It makes the road unusable though it has been finished for the past half year or so. Though its days are clearly numbered, for the Olympics, they just gave the building a nice new coat of paint.
While it is a bit of an eyesore in the middle of the shiny, impressive new buildings in the heart of "new-new-new Beijing," and not "historic," like the hutong courtyards that have continuously been chai'd for as long as we've been here, it'll still be a sad day when we wake up to jackhammers and realize that THE last remnant of non-shiny-impressive-new Beijing on our block is finally gone.
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