Our flat is on the 30th floor of a 36-story building. Our building is one of 10 towers that make up an residential complex built in 2002. The complex’s Chinese name means “Shanghai Bright Star City”, but they translate it expansively as “Shanghai The Future”. In Chinese this sort of residential complex is called a xiaoqu – pronounced like the first syllables of ‘shower’ and ‘chew food’. For more about the Chinese xiaoqu see the next blog post.

In our tower there are four flats on each floor served by two slow, but dependable elevators. Our flat has a living room/dining room, a bedroom with king size bed, a study room, a kitchen, and a bathroom with a washing machine. The living room/dining room, bedroom and study room each has its own heat pump unit for heating in the winter and cooling in the summer (more about Shanghai’s climate in a future post).

The kitchen is outfitted with a three-burner gas range without oven, a microwave, a water filter for making drinking water, and a large (by Chinese standards) refrigerator/freezer. Sliding glass doors open off the living room onto a covered balcony where, like all our neighbors, we hang our laundry to dry. All together we have about 100 square meters of living space (1100 sq.ft.).

There is a low-rise, historically preserved Christian church immediately to the south of our building (more about the True Heart Church in a future post). As a result, our south-facing flat has a permanently unobstructed view and sun all day long. We can see slivers of the Huangpu River and a couple of bridges.