Oh the fog/smog!

Hey all. Our first week in Beijing has been a lesson in just how thick fog (and smog) can get! For visual references, you can see some photos posted at: http://www.goelsgonewild.com/gallery/2005_China.
Now, people in Beijing are saying that they haven't seen weather like this for 10 or 15 years. What's it like? Well, last week, a typhoon (or hurricane) was traveling up the coast and just barely missed hitting Beijing. This, of course, led to torrential rains in Beijing. If you want to see how Beijing'ers handle th rain on bikes, Stacy got some great shots in the galler above.
Now, this torrential rain has led to horrendous humidity. The basic weather pattern the last few days has been the following:

• Morning - walk out of apartment at 7:15 am. It's already humid and hot. Break sweat walking to meet co-workers to get cab in the morning.
• Lunch - walk out of office for lunch at local restaurant at 11:30 am. It still humid and hot. Break sweat walking to/fro restaurant. Wonder if I should find some showers nearby for the safety of my cubible-mates?
• Early evening - break sweat while going to get cab at 5:30 pm to go home. It is still humid and hot.
• Late evening - run out for some errands (sometimes on rollerblades, sometimes on foot) at approximately 7-8 pm. Somehow, the air has always stopped moving and it's actually HOTTER and MORE HUMID than earlier in the day. Come back to apartment drenched in sweat. At this point, I usually rip my shirt off or at least pull it over my belly (henceforth known as "going native") while trying to cool down.

The native Beijingers all claim that this is not normal and that this type of weather won't last. I hope they're correct because the mixture of fog and smog in the morning is fun in the short run but could get a unnerving in the long run. Morning's in the apartment are generally spent getting ready for work and staring out the window at ... nothing. Just a bunch of fog/smog.

After time at work, I am astonished at how constant the smog is and how much it affects visibility. At work in Northwest Beijing, the visibility is at most two city blocks (and this after all of the fog has been burned off). What this means is that you look down the street and everything on the second block away from you disappears in haze and is gone by the end of the second block. (!)

The sun barely makes it through the haze (picture on this coming soon). You can look it straight at it and it's just a bright disk in the haze of what would otherwise be a clear/cloudless day. The notion of a blue sky will have to wait until we leave Beijing on some sort of trip out to the countryside.

That said, Beijing has had one or two clear days when we got some great views from our apartment and we hold out hope that a change in the weather will lessen the impact of the smog. More information on this to come.