Spring!

Spring arrived in Shanghai about 3 weeks ago. I’ve officially packed my winter jackets and hats away until December. The days are now warm (60’s) and the nights still chilly, all with the occasional rain. Every morning I’m woken by the soft chirping of birds and synthesized Mozart from the nearby school (I could do without the music to tell the truth, but it’s better than the bell which it replaced). Best of all, it is the season of light jackets. They tell me it lasts shorter than the blink of an eye, so I'd better enjoy it while I can.

Perhaps only owning one light jacket (the ubiquitous green and white Old Navy track jacket) should be a sign to me that I don’t need that many, but currently I’m up to four. Though they may all be discarded promptly upon my return to the Land of Media Freedom, for now they’re prefect.

With prefect weather to waste a an hour licking an ice cream cone while lying on the grass in the sun of the park next to my work, lunch breaks have never been so good. Sunny places are hard to find in Shanghai, let alone sunny places with grass, but with People Square next to my office I can take a daily walk through the green gardens until it becomes too hot. Plus thats where they sell the cheap Ice Cream.

However, I noticed a rather curious event while returning from my ice-cream-munching break – all the Chinese people were in the shade behind the trees, hiding from the sun! Apparently over the summer they will all don sun umbrellas to hide from the deadly UV rays. Everything I’ve heard was that the Chinese people hide from the sun as to not become ‘dark’, but I’d never seen any evidence before! The sad truth is that ‘darkness’ is too often equated with ‘savagery’ in China. This helps explain the Chinese love of things American and European, and needless disdain for other developing and 3rd world countries.

The bliss of today’s weather cannot last; from now on it will only get hotter and hotter, until one day I will declare to you from a sweat-drenched keyboard that summer has arrived and even the fires of Hades are cooler than a Shanghai summer. I guess I won’t need so many jackets.