Thunderstorms

It's been lightning and thunder nearly every night of my stay here in Shanghai. I, as a California girl, am not quite accustomed to this amount of light and sound. However, light and sound seems to be the basis for everything here. The buildings all proudly illuminate in a multitude of colors once the sky grows dark (which is profoundly earlier than in America). Several people have noted how Vegas-like the display is. The city is a veritable crash course in tacky lighting. Instead of being garish, though, the lights here endear me to the place even more. Sure, it's all too much of a good thing. But the city seems to be aiming to be a hustling, bustling center of activity, which it is without any special effects whatsoever. It is a center of activity simply by being. In a place with twenty million people (that's right, 20 MILLION), to simply exist is to hubbub.

And sound... well, from the arguments of the Shanghainese outside my apartment window to the Western music blaring from every storefront, it never quiets down here.

On that note, let's talk pop music. So far, most of what I've heard is not Asian by any stretch of the imagination, save that one crazy catchy song in a cab with the lyrics (roughly translated): I hope you are happy and prosperous this New Year. The winner of most-played, just by a hair, is the King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson, but only by a hair. Holding on strong to second place seems to be Miley Cyrus, followed closely by Lady Gaga. Other contenders include Ke$ha, Taylor Swift, and Justin Bieber, that trifecta in which the younger you are and the better your hair is, the more likely you are to have actual singing ability. Katy Perry also gets a lot of play here. Who knew that "California Gurls" would follow me all the way to Shanghai? Well, thank God it did, because I definitely didn't hear that song enough in California as it was. (It may be hard to tell in written form, but that was sarcasm.)

Despite this sensory overload, though, I miss clear skies and the simple lights of the Empire State Building in New York. If I hadn't come here, I would probably just now be leaving home for my much-loved New York, but I still miss it immensely. Don't get me wrong. Shanghai is a dream. Literally. Last night I dreamed that all this life here in China was a dream. (Sort of a dream-within-a-dream, Inception-status. Except that the dream within the dream was actual reality. Or was it?) Anyway, I was very upset to find that I wasn't actually in China, after all, because it had been amazing. And I'm so grateful and lucky to have this chance to actually live out what I thought was a dream, to be here and have the lightning and the thunder just outside my window.