Summer has arrived in Shanghai. We’ve just had weeks and weeks and weeks of rain, then all of a sudden it stopped raining and summer arrived. Wow it has been hot. Actually it’s not off the scale in terms of temperature – it’s been late 20s/ early 30s Centigrade but it is so humid it feels far warmer. We’ve had 80-90 percent humidity which in my book is just a few percentage points off being in a shower.
So walking around is pretty brutal and even a few blocks walk feels like an expedition. But that’s not the worst thing about Shanghai summers. Oh no.
The worst thing is that when it gets hot, people want to wear fewer clothes. And, as is the case all over the world, it is never the right people who take their clothes off. The young attractive people seem to wear a rather a lot of clothes even in summer – most often because they don’t want to get a tan. (Actually the Chinese think it is hilarious that Westerners try to get darker when they spend rather a lot of money on whitening treatments.) But the old guys don’t care – they like to roll their vests up into grotesque crop tops. They are everywhere. *shudder*. The bigger the belly, the hotter it gets I guess.
That said, I have been a bit shy to take a portrait of one of these lovelies, so here’s a pic of one on the move to give you an idea. Lovely huh?
