ILSH_I Love Shanghai
by Aryan Mirfendereski


My name is Aryan Mirfendereski. My friends call me “Ary”.
In the summer of 2010, I was offered the chance for a time out, for which I am deeply indebted to my employer for. I was to oversee the technological infrastructure of the Shanghai Expo pavilion. Thanks to the preliminary work done by technicians, there was not much work to be done. The technology would work faultlessly. I only had to be available on call. And that’s how, after a long phase of dreaming of a place where I could not understand anyone and no one understood me, for the first time in my life, I started packing – in a borrowed suitcase, not a travel bag – and flew to Shanghai.

At the airport, I was welcomed via loudspeaker. The polite electronic voice of a woman. For the purpose of saying goodbye to my home country, I bought a double-whopper and a Tsing Tao (Tsing Tao being brewed in a former German colony, and according the German purity law), sat down in one of the fastest Maglevs in the world, and drove to the eastern edge of downtown into the cleanest train station that I had seen in my life until then. I smoked my first cigarette since Frankfurt and almost bought my first Rolex. The watch retailer giggled on seeing my sweat drenched body.

The temperature was 46 degrees Celsius on the 4th of September. I took a taxi (not one of those which tourists take for a fixed tourist price, but an official one, controlled by a police officer at the head of a taxi queue) and showed the driver a DIN A 4 sheet with my new address in Chinese. In turn, the driver showed it to the officer and the two consulted. After calling two other colleagues, real Shanghai experts, the driver then approximately knew where I wanted to go. We communicated by using our hands and making faces. He found it funny to see me sweat. The 10-lane motorway turned into a five-tier inner-city expressway, which, at different levels, almost touched the windows of the residential towers lining the road. Lost in thoughts, I waved my hand at the people behind the windows and admired the extraordinary cleanliness I had experienced up to then. I got off the taxi at a major intersection situated at the Expo entrance number two. Huge crowds of people, soldiers, traffic guards, sweeping machines, gardeners and cleaning personnel. Everything was clean. Everything was safe. Although I had not expected a dirty town, I was astonished by the army of workers and their coordination. After a great deal of to and fro-ing, I found my new living quarters. I had never lived in a compound. The compound had a fountain. Flowerbeds with trees, exercise grounds for the purpose of morning sport. The compound proudly exhibited ten “battery farm”-like apartments made of reinforced concrete. The rest was sealed with tiles like a bathing establishment. Each of the two entrances to the compound had a security cabin and two security guards, to whom I presented my habitation pass. I could not find my apartment block and uselessly
gesticulated with an old man wearing a pyjama. He was not sweating. He felt sorry for me and allowed me to follow him across the yard, into house number five, into the elevator and up to my apartment door which was covered with red and golden luck-bringing banners. I thanked him cordially and we said goodbye...

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