Who moved my cheese?
October 19th, 2008Shinjuku Station in Tokyo funnels two million people a day through its miles of tunnels and 60 exits. A Japanese urban legend says that the exits rotate every fifteen minutes and that’s why it’s so easy to get lost underground there. It took me two years to learn all the exits by heart, so that one day when I was caught in Takashimaya without an umbrella during a typhoon, I was able to figure out a completely underground route home and stay dry.
The underground complex at XuJiaHui in Shanghai has only 14 exits, so it was easy enough to memorize them in a day, but there is one challenge: instead of rotating, the exits are randomly walled up overnight.
This is a photo of Exit 11, which I have used several times, including last night:
Today it’s a dead end. It looks like no exit existed there. (A blind person following the yellow paving stones will have some trouble with this.)
Another indication of the pace of change in Shanghai is this bookstore that’s mentioned in the current-year edition of the Lonely Planet city guide. It’s also walled up with concrete:
