Banpo

Yarnbombing in Banpo area.

There's the abandoned building straight ahead. I climbed it about a third of the way up and saw the lighting quality across the river wasn't that good, so I didn't go farther.

I was on my way to the next stop, when I came across Banpo Jugong Complex 1 and found it in a state of moving out.

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All the doors were closed up, and there were enough people around that getting inside was not considered.

They really taped this one up.

Lots of leaves at this one.

The trees around the complex are all pretty tall.

I thought the pattern in the paint retouches or whatever it is looked like a cityscape. Incidentally, the little crawlspace underneath is a legitimate hiding spot, and I've taken cover in those before.

It's just a wall of parallel apartments, with taller ones at the end, themselves likely the result of a previous remodeling project.

On the right is a kind of strip mall they had throughout the complex.

This is the end of this strip mall. I like the architecture. The whole thing feels a bit communist.

This was some sort of community center.

I roamed all around the empty streets.

It was hard to photograph the actual buildings.

This kind of shows how they look.

Here's some of the commercial space out on the main road, which had alerted me in the first place.

All closed down.

Across the street was another large complex, this one a little more behind in moving out.

This basement shelter entrance caught my eye.

Okay, that is definitely catching my eye.

And this catches a cat's eye.

I leapt over the side rail, only to find out the gate was unlocked. Anyway, here's the basement.

Most of the buildings if not all had such a shelter. The cover is sloped to shade them from the north, and I'm taking a wild guess one of the intended functions was bomb shelter. Though after almost 50 years, they were probably never used as that unless for drills.

On this side, basically one street down, the other end of the buildings doesn't seem to have the shelters.

I believe this was a garbage can shaped like a fast food drink.

Next I got to a roof where I could overlook the complex. This is the first area I entered.

This panorama shows three areas: a third area I haven't been in yet, the middle area which is the first area I was in, and then on the far right, the still active area. Now might be a good time to mention this area has 114 buildings.

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I made a couple attempts to shoot this building properly.

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Everything down there I didn't get to. You can see a street in the lower right that cuts between the section I'm in and the unvisited one.

This attempt was better, at least for the one building.

That's the direction I'm going. My next stop is an abandoned neighbourhood somewhere behind that hill.

A better look at the part still being emptied.

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Oh crap, now there's a security guard on the roof below me. He was down there at least 20 minutes, pacing around the entire time. Each lap took about 90 seconds, and I was just calculating the best way to climb down the ladder and either hide or get to a door without being seen. Then he stopped on his own.

I took this panorama attempting to get a better look at the other side of the river.

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Here's an even closer look.

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I had to kill a lot of time up there.

Okay, he's gone. I went down and stood in the middle of the roof, trying to figure out if 90 seconds is a really long time to walk the circumference of it.