We had a thunderstorm yesterday, which I normally wouldn't mention--Shanghai has a lot of them in the summer--except yesterday's seemed to be a little more serious than average. How much more serious? I'll show you.

The view from our balcony at 3:45 PM today:



The view from our balcony at 3:45 PM yesterday:

(Hint: the SECOND one is the one taken during the storm! You can thank me later.)

And yes, the second picture was taken in the middle of the afternoon, despite what it looks like. When I first heard the thunder I thought it was just construction noise, which is also very common around here. When I realized it was thunder, I was surprised because the weather didn't seem that bad out--a little cloudy, but not the sort of weather one associates with gigantic storms. I went back to my computer and stopped thinking about it until about ten minutes later when I glanced out the window and realized it had suddenly gotten a lot darker. Ten minutes after that it was dark as midnight and raining so fast that I could see the streets starting to flood as I watched. It was pretty crazy. Even crazier was the fact that twenty minutes later the storm was completely gone and everything was back to normal, which is a word I'm starting to use increasingly loosely as time goes on ...