Blue Skies

 A few postings back, I complained about how gray and overcast and smoggy the weather has been.  As if to prove me a liar, the skies cleared about three weeks ago and we've had day after day of blue skies.  Real blue skies....sometimes with puffy white clouds, as the photo above shows.  At night, you can see the lights all the way to the horizon and you can see stars in the skies.

 Now, I don't think I'd seen 15 days with blue skies in total over the last year-and-a-half.  Since mid-July, we've had them every day.  In the mid-day sun the temperatures get up into the mid to upper 90s. (35 degrees C. or above).  But the humidity doesn't seem as crazy as it did last summer.  It is still humid - more so than in Indiana I think.  But it is not crazy-stinking-tropical-humid.  In fact, the blue skies have also been accompanied by strong breezes (also an odd thing for summer in Suzhou).  The breeze actually feels cool when it hits you, instead of like a jet of steam from a busted heating pipe.

We owe the good weather to the typhoon season.  Normally, during June, the weather patterns that bring the plum rains also keep the typhoons to the South.  Since the end of the rainy season (which was not very rainy this year) the typhoons have been coming Northward into the East China Sea.  Like a huge vacuum cleaner, they suck out the stagnant air.  They keep the breezes going too.

Most of the Suzhou Expat wives and kids have flown home for the long hot summer.   There are just a few of Theresa's friends left in town.  Within our apartment complex, the  few summer lingerers have been spending almost every day down at the swimming pool, enjoying the glorious weather.  Difficult to see, but in the photo above you might make out a train of children being pulled around the pool on their little floaty toys.