Orange-gray snow

It's amazing how much it takes out of you waking up each morning in Beijing and seeing a gray sky. There is clear blue greeting you every once in a while, usually after some precipitation the night before. Getting up before the sun rises is pretty great as you're left hopeful that the upcoming day could be a clear one.

This morning I woke up to blackness. Around sunrise, the atmosphere was lit up a bizarre shade of orange, like some massive Dickensian oil lamp illuminating the entire cityscape. It was at once kinda scary and awesome, seeing Beijing like that enveloped and orange and also a thick layer of snow from the night before. Snow is awesome. The sounds of the crowing rooster that live behind our building (in urban downtown Beijing) were soft, and you could hear adult guys laughing with one another on the sidewalk in ways that wouldn't be possible on "regular" days as gray-orange as this if there was no snow on the ground.