No light, no depth, no colour -
Everywhere greyness.
Beijing in August. Christ, it's still only the middle of July! We have six or seven more weeks of this shit to struggle through. Now I remember why I always aim to quit Beijing in the summer (but only seem to succeed in doing so in alternate years).
Spells like this - drab, overcast, super-humid - where we don't see the sun for days or weeks at a time quickly induce SAD.
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While looking for an image for a post at my blog, I came across this post -- and what an image! -- at an architecture-focused site called BLDGBLOG. It's from July 2008; the photo itself comes from a James Fallow article in The Atlantic.
It defies imagination that this might be a typical photo, for this time of year or any other!
Things were particularly grim in the month before the Olympics - they were saving up their smog-busting tactics (closing down factories and construction sites, limiting the number of cars on the roads, going apeshit on the cloud-seeding) for August.
However, that picture really doesn't look so bad. The light level seems relatively bright. And there's not the visible - palpable - grittiness in the air that you get when the pollution's really severe.
Things cheered up briefly yesterday lunchtime, and it looks as though today's going to be OK (though still a bit overcast; not much blue sky to be seen, but at least the sunshine is getting through). Prior to that, we'd had six straight days of continuous twilight. Really, it causes depresssion, it causes jet-lag: you get out of bed at 8am, and it feels like 7pm - utter temporal disorientation.
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