que pasa

Some of you have probably seen the soap The O.C. and enjoyed the drama that was going on there.  I'm seeing The R.C. over here, live.  The Residents' Committee.

The other night, when i came home, there were 20 people gathered in the lobby (which made it feel rather claustrophobic actually) talking at the top of their voices.  In shanghainese.  On the way up, I asked the other passenger what was going on and my memory is fuzzy on this, but she either said that they were talking about the new R.C. or changing the R.C. 

Some of you know what I'm talking about.  In every private estate, some residents get voted into a committee to represent the interests of the community and make decisions for the public good.  Turns out over here, in my 1 block estate, it's time for elections again (and it's time to please the people) or we just changed the R.C (and they wanna flex some muscles, like the first 100 days of the President coming into office).

So, we've had

• that old billboard torn off the wall (exposing these small square toilet-looking mosaic tiles)
• the dingy "reception" office/apt on the ground floor renovated (it now has a new coat of spanking white paint on the wall so bright that it blinds you when you come in, and it took like 2 weeks to get it done too so you couldn't possibly miss it)
• the crappy cracked leather sofas that were sitting in the what-we-call-a-lobby removed leaving no place to sit (though to be fair i didn't think anyone was sitting on them anyways)
• the cleaning crew come and scrub the floors of said lobby smack in the middle of the day when there was tons of traffic and did not look any better for the cleaning (but it's almost as if they wanted to make sure everybody knew the cleaning crew came)
• new white zone lines painted for the bicycle parking section (not that you didn't know where where it was before with the 50 plus so bikes parked in the same area)

Maybe they'll do something really useful and and offer each apartment a few free hours of cleaning service...