Have a healthy weekend

I seem to have caught a bit of a summer cold. Yuck. Apparently, all expats are prone to one when they first arrive. It's the body getting used to living in such a polluted environment. How lovely.

The pollution has probably been one of the hardest things to get used to. In LA, you could often see the smog hover over downtown, and that was bad enough. But here, it envelops you and swallows you whole. It can be hard to breathe on some days, days when the sun and blue sky lie behind a wall of gray.

Mike and I downloaded an app that reports the day's air quality. It's funny (in a scary sort of way) to see the difference between the numbers reported by the China Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) and the US Consulate. I'm happy to say that today's numbers are much better than what they have been, when the US Consulate actually recommended masks!