Coming home late

Lately I've been spending a lot of time in my office. Mostly because I find my little apartment depressing and there is only so much time you can spend at the gym. While I'm in my office I should be working on my thesis, the deadline for which is looming in about a week and half. But instead I watch Jon Stewart and read the NYT.

But that's not what I wanted to write about. What I wanted to write about is what it's like to live in a 小区 in China. I live in what would be a considered an apartment complex in the states. But here it is walled off from the street on two sides, and from the other apartment complexes on the other two sides. There are two gates (as far as I know), one on Hankou Lu and the other on the tiny alley where Swede and Kraut is (the german restaurant) and Hong Bang (my tailor's nemesis) has his sweatshop. The gate on Hankou Lu is guarded by a family consisting of a 3 people who all live in the same room which is located right by the gate. It closes at 8:30pm and from then on you have to ride/walk around to get to the other main gate that is big enough for a car to drive through. There are no cars allowed into the 小区， unless you are moving something big and need the car to get close to the building. There is no parking inside. Only paths and bicycles and trees with people's underwear hanging on lines between them.

If you are unlucky enough to come home so late that the main gate has closed (11pm-ish) then you have to abandon your bike outside the safety of walls for the night. To get inside you have to go through a little door that leads to a tiny room where the gate guard is asleep in a bunk bed. The room reeks of gasoline because his moped is also parked inside. How he got it in there I have no idea. Then there is another little door that leads to the guardroom. Usually just a little room where during the day the gate guard and his buddies sit and drink tea and smoke cigarettes while listening to screeching old timey chinese music.

Most recently though, late at night, around 1:00am, when I get home and creep through the guards bedroom, this room has been packed with middle aged men in military uniforms smoking up a storm. It's a funny situation. I'm surprised, they're surprised, and we all try to pretend that the other isn't there.