I have just come home from working in China for a few weeks, and remarked on a number of things. Forgive the rambling; I have been awake for 40 hours travelling.
Shenzhen
Shenzhen is a quickly built city that exists in the seesaw middle-ground between post apocalyptic mayhem and utopia. There may be a five star hotel here, a run down block of apartments there; a gleaming shopping centre on one side of the road, a field full of rubbish on the other; spanish villas, shanty towns. It has sprinklings of each side, but never full fruition of either.
As a general rule of thumb, even if things look alright, they're always a bit shit.
'Ol Factory Output
To be back in the clear air of Dublin is wonderful. In China, when you wake up the air is heavy in your hotel room. When you go to work, the air around the traffic is heavy. When you are at work, the air is heavy.
With the pollution from the cars and factories, the dust from the construction sites, and the heat of the day, the air feels like it weighs more in your lungs. Buildings a few hundred metres away look greyed out by the smog. All colours are faded. All smells are faded. The world is a brown-grey haze.
Walking back up Grafton Street was like turning a screen from black and white to colour. The air, so thin and clean, and a myriad of smells floating past; a bakery, a woman's perfume, cigarette smoke, a shop selling soaps, a coffee shop with it's doors open, a rainbow of smells.
And the sky! Rather than a homogenous grey haze, the sky is blue. There are even well defined clouds with white centres and golden outlines! Buildings that are hundreds of metres away appear in crisp Technicolor HD images. It's like what being on drugs is meant to be like, but undoubtedly better because it comes with the clarity of mind that only 20 hours of long haul flights seem to give.
Katy Perry
Back home, I'm just out of the shower. I had the strangest experience as I was getting in. My body seemed to develop a light, sharp ache all over the surface of my skin. It came on a little at first, but within a minute I was shaking with it, and a blue flame of familiarity lit in my head; I had rediscovered "cold".
It comes as quite a surprise to have "coldness" thrown on you when you haven't experienced it for a few weeks, and it reminded me of my feelings when I came back from Australia. I kept them in a little notebook so here they are, for your pleasure. They seem obvious and trivial to read, but they were so far from the norm that they made an impression on me.
1. Tap water is cold.
2. The ground outside stings your feet.
3. The fridge has so much stuff in it.
4. Clothes are really heavy.
5. People are pale and blotchy.
6. There's stuff to think about everywhere.
7. Metal hurts to touch (cold).
