About a month ago I stumbled upon this news article about the highest residential building in the world from the New York Times and could not stop smiling about it:
The Downside to Life in a Supertall Tower: Leaks, Creaks, Breaks
As you might remember we are for the moment still living in a high rise building. According to this Wikipedia article we have now been pushed from rank 2 to rank 5 in the list of highest residential buildings. Obviously New York really could not let the fact that Dubai had outdone the Big Apple stay true (just look at the table in the article) and had to catch up in the competition for the highest residential building. I still did not really manage to calculate how many meters above ground this exactly is but it is high enough to let people on the ground below shrink to the size of ants.
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| Tallest residential buildings in the world in 2015 |
As I mentioned before, I wouldn't like to live here forever but it is an exciting experience for a couple of months. Living so high above the ground has its own challenges, quirks and perks.
I can for example attest that the wind in the hallways and the whole apartment during stormy days sounds like a really loud whistle and at night times it can feel like living in a haunted house. There is also a small water leak in the wall between the master bedroom and the en suite bathroom but nobody seems to feel like opening the wall and checking it out for real. Instead the real estate agent sent a worker to paint over the water stain. Maybe they want to fix it when we moved out in a months or two, since it doesn't seem too dramatic (yet). But since we are only renting it, I see my role reduced to simply report any damages that I detect and hope for the best. Something more that is rather annoying is the dark hallway leading up to our apartment. With no source of daylight, the functioning of the electric light fixtures and motion detectors is crucial. But somehow the ones in front of our and a neighbouring apartment are not functioning properly, despite several attempts of the maintenance team to fix this. So when standing in front of the door, I am mostly fumbling in the darkness or with the flash light on my phone after the keys in my bag. Sometimes when I step out of the apartment, all the lights are magically on. But I so far could not figure out from which direction a person came to work that kind of magic or whatelse might have caused the motion detectors to function. Light switches are also no where to be found. A fact that is rather bemusing since every single electricity outlet in the apartment has its own on-/off-switch. Not sure what the logic was there.
Another thing that makes me marvel is the balustrade on the balconies. Once more a situation in live where I am decidedly happy to not be too tall. The balustrade/railing reaches up exactly to my chest with the minimum height recently being raised again. A fast internet search showed that in 2013 there were still fatal accidents with children falling out of windows and from balconies because the railings were rather low, reaching up only 90 cm. Now it should be around 1,40 m, which feels really secure. But I do not envy anybody taller than me, having that balustrad/railing going lower than chest height on me would definitely be a reason not to live that high up. Or utilize the balcony. Primarily of course because of the children but secondly also because I am not that fond of heights. Or - to be more precise - standing close to edges of great heights. Just looking straight down from the balcony makes me go dizzy and uncomfortable. And righteously so: looking at the above picture we should be about 275 meters up, living on floor 75 from all in all 97. But as long as you look straight ahead it's a marvellous view.
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| The view straight down on the street below from our lower balcony. |
It also fascinates me how the human mind works. Every time I enter the elevator I do feel completely safe. Never mind that I am on my way up 275 meters or am already dangling 275 meters above a narrow abyss hanging on a couple of steal cables, fully confident that they will not fail. I occasionally wonder what I would do if I got stuck - or worse, the cables would rip. I must have watched too many action movies with faulting elevators and people climbing around in lift shafts. Oh, and don't forget to clear the pressure on the ears around floor 40 on the way up!
People are often mindless and so complaints about noise and disruption are regular. Not from us though except for once when a bunch of younger people decided to have a spontaneous dance- and sing-out at two in the night on the balcony to the left, one floor above our sleeping rooms. In this case I solved it the good old German/Swedish/European way with the aimed usage of clearly understandable expletives to emphasize the lack of my enthusiasm. A better idea would have been to talk to the security guards but that idea struck me only the next morning. Actually under normal circumstances I would have hardly noticed it or cared for it but it had been a bad night anyway, with kids waking up because of bad dreams and some other things going on that were stressing me. In this case the party was the last drop and definitely keeping me from sleeping again.
But there are also things being thrown from balconies. Not such a good idea since the wind will push things thrown down towards the house again and whatever is flying down is certain to land on a balcony further below. The most recent announcement in the elevator (I forgot to take a picture) was highlighting an incident with a glass bottle (!) that landed and subsequently broke in pieces on a fifth floor balcony next to a playing child. It is about there where it stops to be funny in my opinion.
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| There - I fixed the foto. But since I was in a hurry, it's a bit blurry. And a rhyme. ;) |
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