World Window on Memory Lane

So I'm following a department directive to have a travel visa for China ready, just in case. The application requires the "Inviter, Contact, or Your Relative in China." I don't have a trip planned so I have no answer for that but the bureaucratic procedure rescue line said to just put in the company's Shanghai address. Searched the company internal website for it but no luck. Found it on the external website by using Google. Sheesh.

All right, well, now that I had that, why not take a look from the air, right? Put it in Google Maps and zoomed in. You know Street View? Well, Google camera cars haven't cruised Minhang yet so there's no street view BUT when you grab the little street view man, little icons pop up to indicate pictures taken by someone sometime and geo-tagged and put in the database. I looked at a few and thought this one was just to cool.

Typical street view. I have a bunch of pictures, some of them sort of like that, taken in '06 and '07 when I had the luck to go to Shanghai. I never went to our company office in Minhang. Just an electronics factory full of fourteen year old girls whose parents couldn't afford to send to school. It was in Minhang somewhere too, an oddly spooky place where the sky was always a pinkish gray and the few remaining vacant lots had the decimated remains of villages churned into the fresh earth, ready for another round of skyscraper construction.