If it’s all the same to you, I’ll stay at the cheap motel in the bad part of town. But thanks.

I’m not entirely sure I’d trust this:

A construction crew in the south-central Chinese city of Changsha has completed a 15-story hotel in just six days.

Six days? Show of hands: who wants to be first spending a week on the top floor? How about the bottom floor? How about the Communist Party leadership? Are they going first?

I don’t see too many hands.

This paragraph caught my eye:

If nothing else, this remarkable achievement will stoke further complaints from American economic pundits that China’s economy is far more accomplished than ours in tending to such basics as construction.

Somehow I think similar feats have been accomplished elsewhere. And: was this some new, hyper-efficient process that will be repeated regularly? Or a set-up one-off?

… The work crew erected the hotel — a soundproofed, thermal-insulated structure reportedly built to withstand a magnitude 9 earthquake — with all prefabricated materials. In other words, a crew of off-site factory workers built the sections, and their on-site counterparts arranged them on the foundation for the Ark project.

The story doesn’t say whether the pre-fab was all done in the same 6-day period, or whether it was all sitting ready when the project started. It makes a difference.

All that aside, though, it is quite an accomplishment:

Hopefully it’ll still be standing and in good shape five years from now.