This other night I noticed that there was a little damage to part of the building when I came in the front door. Last week was “Singles Day” 11:11 which is the biggest shopping day in China and this year the sales jumped up nearly 30% to over $25 Billion US. By the time I was heading out the following morning there were already many deliveries being made. I got a 32GB USB drive and a power-bank for the phone and so that was my 100 rmb for this year. So you are asking what has this got to do with the damage, well as the entrance is quite small and it looks like some people were buying the complete contents for their home, some of the items being delivered were rather large. Fridges, dishwashers, TV’s almost anything you can think of was bought and was being delivered. So somewhere in amongst the many deliveries part of the building was damaged.

According to Bloomberg,  it’s barely two hours into Singles Day and the Chinese have already forked over a cool $8.6 billion for friends and family.

To my horror and utter amazement it seems that this building I am in has some sort of polystyrene cladding. Now I’m sure it will have some good thermal properties but the real concern of course, “Is it another Grenfell?” I am here for another two weeks and I’m on the forth floor, which is really the third floor because they follow the stupid American way of counting floors. But never the less I don’t really want to have to exit via a window.

The cladding looks so convincing, it looks like stone and it makes you wonder if and possibly when will such a disaster strike China. There have been many fires around the world and many other tall residential buildings have some form of cladding that is actually fuel for a potential fire. Not a very comforting thought if you are living on the 30th floor.