Today I met my language tutor, whom I usually meet at Fudan, in her neighborhood, the former French Concession. The Japanese-style coffee shop we went to was full of old junk, as, indeed, is the whole area - old junk and new, in lots of tiny shops, along tunnel-like avenues of
platanus trees (is that their name?) which will soon be gorgeous yellow and orange, and different again, she promised, when bare gnarled branches wrangle the winter sky. Like my neighborhood near Fudan, this one doesn't feel like part of a turbo-charged futuristic mega-city at all.
