Monday, January 28, 2008

Walking in a Winter Wonderland



The picture above says it all - it's snowing in Shanghai! My god! I realize it's nothing compared to living in the American Midwest or something horrible like that. It's actually a little hard to even see the snow here, without blowing up the picture. But I've only seen it snow a handful of times in my life, and never to the point that it leaves anything on the ground.

There's not much remaining on the ground - on the street it just melts right away, so I have to search down parks to take pictures. In a few places there's dirty slush, it's difficult to walk on. Really it's pretty miserable - temperatures are already stuck somewhere around freezing, and for the past few days, when it hasn't been snowing, there's been rain or sleet. And it's supposed to stay that way for another week!

That brings it up against the start of the Chinese New Year's, when everybody jumps on a train and heads back to their hometown in the country. Right now trains are being delayed by the snow. If that situation doesn't improve by Chinese New Year's, wow, things are going to be ugly. Also, vegetable prices have spiked while availability has lowered - my friend estimates the prices are twice as high as normal, although I don't know if it's that much. Either way, it's coming on top of the already-existing Food Inflation.

In conclusion, I've decided that snow is kind of fun for fifteen minutes, after that it is a pain and we should get rid of it.

Update February 25th: It got much worse over the next week or two, here's a couple more pictures:



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