Shanghai Lujiazui Aerial View Countdown Timer

From this height Shanghai stops being a city and becomes a diagram of one, all those towers in Pudong packed together like teeth, the Jin Mao and the one with the curved top and the whole glass forest of them, and then the river, brown and wide and patient, and then on the far bank the endless low grey spread of the old city going out to the horizon in every direction. I shot this from a high window on a hazy afternoon, which is why it has that sepia wash over everything, as if the picture had been left in the sun. Down at street level there is a roundabout and a park and about a hundred thousand cars, and from up here they are just a pattern, dots moving along the lines. What I like is the scale of it. A single building near the bottom of the frame is taller than most of the towns I have lived in, and it is one building among hundreds. I stood at the glass a long time. The river kept moving. Nothing else did. I left the window open a crack and listened to it.