Well that was weird.
It was 4 a.m., two hours after I fell asleep, when a relentless thunderstorm woke me up last night. We keep the curtain closed so we’re not blinded in the morning, but the light was still getting through. This wasn’t normal thunder — it was more like a boulder rolling down a long mountain. This wasn’t normal lightning — it was like somebody was welding outside my ninth-floor window.
My first instinct waking up at 4 a.m. is, of course, to send a text message. Maybe that’ll help? When I realized
The view from our rooms at Renmin University
I was awake and alert and still a little freaked out I decided to go check it out.
The view from my window looked as it always would at that time of the night: an empty street below lined with a row of high-rise residence halls. But one thing was missing: rain.
Somewhere off in the distance — down south, from the sound of it — there was an epic storm going on. I had never heard such a constant stream of thunder and lightning, and in my 4 a.m. state of mind I realized: This is it, there is an air raid on Beijing and my hotel will have crumbled to the ground by morning.
My fears weren’t put to rest when the weather.com reading said Beijing’s state would best be described as “fair.” I started typing in any reliable source I could think of: New York Times, International Herald Tribune, The Guardian; I even broke my own rules and checked CNN.com.
There was no air raid.
My roommate Eric Durban, who was eying me last night, claimed to have not heard a thing. Neither did a guy down the hall. I asked Alex Monnig though, and he too was woken up by the storm. It was something bizarre, we decided, and we couldn’t quite figure it out. If there was a lot of thunder, a lot of lightning, no rain and a fair weather forecast, something had to be up.
Our best guess is that we were awoken by the notorious Beijing weather rockets shot into the sky to control the rain. It makes sense in that today is the Closing Ceremonies and nobody wants it to rain on David Beckham — ceremoniously receiving the Olympic flame for London 2012. That doesn’t really explain the lightning though. I also feel like I would have heard them before, as an article posted I read a few weeks ago said something like 2,000 rockets were sent up before the Opening Ceremonies, and I’m sure they’ve been used since.
There was something weird going on last night.
- Chros McDougall
Filed under: Student posts, Uncategorized
