Gimme (bomb) shelter

Now that I have my computer back, I've been trying to get caught up in the past several months of partially finished posts.

This year there's been an uptick of interest in the labyrinth of bomb shelters that Mao had built under the city of Beijing. Stretching for unknown miles, this subterranean city was built to shield the population from nuclear fallout. It was never put to such use, so Beijingers found other purposes for the space, like low rent housing.

Just because the Mao years are over, though, doesn't mean that bomb shelters have faded into oblivion. When we moved to Changping almost four years ago, I noticed something strange about the parking garage under our apartment building. It had heavy doors that were open but could seal off the garage. "Blast doors," Randy explained to me. I don't know if we had these in Shenzhen, too, because we were never in parking garages there.

I never was able to get a picture of these blast doors, but I did at our local WalMart that was only built in the past five years.





I don't know if they help me feel either safe or prepared.