"It's raining through my umbrella."

The later spring is rainy season here in Shanghai.  It rains a little every day, and it is rainy for a month or two.  The rain is fairly warm and can pour down like only a tropical rainstorm can.  It's a good idea to keep an umbrella at your home and at your office so you aren't caught off guard.  The air stays damp and the locals try not to wash clothes because this makes the air even more damp in their homes.  You can't hang the clothes outside to dry, after all.

This spring a flu/infection went around that lasted for several months and only cleared up after the wet season ended.  It convinced me of what my Chinese teacher had said each week, that this is a dangerous season and people need to take precautions.  I'm not sure if the bacteria are in the water, the air, or the earth, but it hospitalized several people, and you can hear the people on the subway coughing, probably passing it around.  I had it for almost three months.

No pictures of rain, just the usual smoggy sky as seen from from a shopping center.

I grew up in the tropics.  I like tropical rainstorms, warm heavy rain that, as a child,
I liked to go out and play in.  We used to stand under the rain barrels when they filled with rainwater and get doused with the overflow.  Or stand under the eaves of the tin roofs where the water poured in streams down the troughs of the corrugated roofing.

But one thing I don't think I ever experienced before this spring was the rain pouring through my umbrella.  Maybe because I just played in the rain without an umbrella as a child? Or maybe because in the South American rainy season it rains for a short period everyday and then stops?

On the corner near one of the subway stops on Huaihai Rd. a main avenue, people hang their bird cages out to let their birds sing and get "fresh" air.

In Shanghai it rains for days.  The rain can pour down for hours.  I have to walk three blocks to my subway station.  It doesn't take that long.  But halfway there I looked up to find the rain coming through the fastenings at the center of the umbrella, and raining through the soaked fabric.  "Interesting," I thought, "I don't think I've ever experienced that before.  I wonder if other people have."

This last week a rainstorm again hit Shanghai.  There I was with my parasol (it's hot standing in 90 degree heat on the black pavement, so even though I don't mind the sun on my skin, I get the parasol thing) opened for the rain, watching it rain through the fabric.  "Oh, I remember this," I thought.

Welcome to Shanghai,
Ann

Metro Commute

I changed jobs.  I'm working for an internet startup on the edge of Shanghai.  The office is in a "villa" in the Pudong District. It's a beautiful building with a garden in a closed gate community.  The only drawback is that it takes an hour on the subway and a shuttle bus ride to get to the house.

Outside the villa.

At rush  hour the subways are crowded body to body, like sardines in a can.  It is not comfortable, but on hot days it is even worse, or on rainy days when more people take the subway.  The Chinese know how to push to get the last possible person onto the train.  So you know why they have problems with people getting trampled or suffocated at holidays with big crowds.

There is the MetroTV screen playing advertisements and news clips in each car, and it is a little bit of distraction from the discomfort.  A lot of what they show is advertisements for  the Metro itself.  You see lines of people getting onto the subways and crowds of people standing on the subways, and streams of people pushing their way through the crowds to get off.  And you wonder why the Metro would bother to show you these pictures, because you are living this everyday, and you don't need to see more of it.  Of course some of it is how to act, what you can and can't do, and what to do in an emergency. Sigh! At least they are trying to improve the crowd etiquette.

Then, after a while you begin to think of the hundreds of thousands, millions really, of people being transported across the city daily to start their jobs in the morning.  It begins to make you feel like you are part of something bigger.  The big working of a machine of one of the worlds largest cities, a financial center of a growing economy.  Maybe you feel a little proud to be a little part of the whole.

But that wears off too after a while.  I turn on my music and put in my earphones and watch the people and the subway stations going by like on a travel movie, disinterestedly, or romantically, or thoughtfully, watching time and people pass.

The "Library" at the villa.

I'll be glad when the office moves into the city center.  It will cut the commute time from an hour and a half to, maybe, half an hour.  I will have  a life again and be able to do things in the evening besides just come home and sleeping.

But I'll miss the private garden and the "home cooked" meals at the villa.

The gardens and patio.

But maybe the office building will have some of these things also.

Greetings from Shanghai,

Ann Elliott