Out of the Smog

Yesterday I dealt with some smog.

The level of smog that I'm dealing with is one thing that people seem to be curious about since I've come to China. It's true, China has a lot of pollution. There's plenty of factories and tons of cars, and not all of them are spouting water vapour. But thankfully, the majority of this problem is confined to China's largest cities.

My city, Jilin, boasts only a modest 4 million, so it's actually considered to be quite small by Chinese standards. Therefore, the pollution I've experienced in my almost five months here has been minor and uncommon. On some cloudy days, things seem a little hazy in the distance, and once I saw some low-lying smog from a train ride outside of Jilin. It's been negligible- until yesterday.

Click on these to make them bigger and beautiful-er.

Yesterday I woke up to a fog so dense, you'd think the British were coming. It was in the streets, between packed buildings, and completely obliterated the river; Stephen-King-level thick. I actually heard a couple people got pulled out of supermarkets into The Mist where they were eaten by monsters. Here are some picture I took not long after sunset. The smog was starting to dissipate as the evening got cooler, but you can still see plenty of haze. It's not just bad photography this time!

The silver lining on this gray cloud is that apart from the poor visibility, it was a really nice day. I haven't double-checked the science on this, but I believe that it can't rain when that much pollution is present. Apparently those smog particles are just jerks, they'll take water droplets out behind a cloud and beat the crap out of them.

Today things were right back to normal. Although this next picture wasn't taken today, you get the idea. I swear it looked exactly like this. The smog is gone, it's business as usual, and I can go back to staring across that river I love so much.