Breathing Easy??

On Sunday I woke up and felt as if an elephant had been sitting on my chest all night.  My lungs and upper chest just hurt.  I did a mental checklist of my activities from the previous couple of days.  Get in a massive bar-room brawl?? No.  Be trampled by a heard of stampeding buffalo??  No.  Be out and about for the last two days in Beijing....oh, yes...that must be it. 

One thing that I always heard in the states was 'you can never exaggerate the state of the pollution in Beijing...it will blow you away'.  I hadn't really thought much about it until I woke up feeling like my lungs had been battered and bruised.  Sure, there are REALLY bad days when you can't really see anything in the distance because the smog is so bad...and yeah I recognize the thin layer of 'film' that forms on everything so rapidly here...but I hadn't really put two and two together on how it was affecting my health until today.

I found this picture on somebody else's blog today and I think it does a pretty good job at illustrating the last few days of pollution here.

The crazy thing about these pictures are that they remind me of maybe a photo taken at dusk...or perhaps taken in a thick fog...nope neither is true in this case.  At any rate, feeling it in your lungs really gives you a wake up call to pay more attention to it.  After checking out some local 'pollution monitoring' sites for Beijing I discovered that the levels were at a 'hazardous' rating for those last couple of days where I was walking out and about.  At the very least, now I know to monitor the situation a little better and to stay inside when it gets too bad.  I don't think I'll turn into one of those people who wear masks around all the time (there are quite a few who do that here)...but monitoring the situation couldn't hurt right?  Neither does rain...oh glorious rain...it rained on Sunday...so it is blue skies again :-)

That is all for now, just sharing what was on my mind.

Zaijian,
Gary