rain
China taught me to love rain.
The first few months in Changsha were autumn fading into winter. The weather went from comfortable to cold like Dunedin. Rain was an irritation. The few snowfalls we got were fun. Winter was short, and March and April of 2000 were quite pleasantly warm.
Then on May Day 2000 the heat turned on. I was in Yangshuo on that particular day, and arrived back in Changsha a couple of days later. But the heat was on, and with a vengeance.
You might have heard of the Three Furnaces - three cities notorious for intense summer heat. They are Nanjing, Wuhan, and Chongqing. Notice how they're all along the Yangtze River? Notice how Changsha is on the Xiang River, which is a tributary (via Dongting Lake) of the Yangtze? Having experienced summer in Changsha, I think I've got a pretty good idea of what summers in the Three Furnaces are like.
Anyway, Changsha seemed to settle into a pretty regular pattern: Three days of increasingly stifling heat and humidity, followed by three days of torrential rain.
And the rain could get scary - the river grew wild, and the houses on Orange Island still bore the high water marks from floods a couple of summers previous. But as soon as the rain started the temperature dropped and the humidity seemed to just vanish. Faith in the city's suitability for life was restored. Then the cycle would repeat.
Then I moved up to Taiyuan. Summers were warm, yes, but humidity was not a problem. Taiyuan's problems were more of the dry climate industrial city variety: Dust and smog. On the rare occasions it did rain or snow the air was suddenly clear again.
Beijing sits somewhere between those two extremes - summers can get intensely humid, but the humid period is really only July and August. Dust and smog can be a problem, but sitting on the North China Plain - much unlike Taiyuan's location in the Fen River valley surrounded by mountains - seems to let smog dissipate more easily. But the magic of rain to cool the temperature and clean the air remains the same.