Acrobats in our apartment

Ever since we moved here we have  been wondering about how to fill this big empty white wall in  our hallway at the entrance to our apartment. All we knew we that we wanted to hang up one of my photographs and that we wanted it BIG.

We only had two small problems:
A) choose the right one  from nearly 40.000 pictures
B) how on earth are we going to hang it up on that wall which is from the lowest bottom to top 4 meters high and a ladder would be difficult to balance on stairs?

A couple of weeks ago we fould a solution for problem "a" and came to the conclusion that since we are not living facing the skyline of Shanghai we simply bring it into our flat. And therefore chose a picture which I took on a sunny September day at the Bund.

Soon I had it printed at the "Shanghai Photomarket", one of my favorite places in town :-). It is two buildings of 4 floors selling only photorelated stuff. One shop is specialized in prints and there we had our picture blown up on Aluminium 1,70 x 1,20 meters.

But were still left with the issue of how to get it up the wall . And because we are not supposed to do any DIYing in our aparment,  we called Sophie from our relocation agency who helped arranging the building team from our Landlord.

This morning 9:30 Sophie and the builders arrived and I was quite excited to see the way the guys solved the issue with our stair case:
Whilst one guy climbed up with the drill  the another guy (with a bandage already around his finger) lifted up with his arms that part of the ladder which was too short to reach the staircase:

Sometimes I think it is more breathtaking to watch builders and carpenters performing their jobs than watching any acrobats in Shanghai circus..I think it would drive anyone who is responsible for health and safety in Europe or Americas nuts :-)

A massive round hole of easily 2cm in diameter was drilled into the wall, before a large piece of square wood was hammered into that. I guess a chinese solution for an anchor fitting (Dübel). Once the wood was in place a screw was put into the wood and a minute later the show was over and on one injured. Together we enjoyed the outlook onto Pudong Sykline.. and I was beaming with pride!!