Give me some light!

When I looked at the calender yesterday I noticed that the Europe just enjoyed the 21st of June, start of Summer, longest day of the year and I caught myself thinking:  I can´t help it, June is the most depressing month of the year in Shanghai.

Back home I  love June. Not only because it is my birthday month but I love the long days and beeing outside. BBQ´s,  fresh strawberry cake,going camping,  lazing on the river until late at night.... I know that the summer so far was not to everyones expectations in Europe. But let me tell you what June is like here:

Imagine the greyest November day - but leave the leaves on the trees. Than you bring in 80% humidity, so bad that mold is actually growing on the pavement - and than you heat it up to about 28 degrees.
To top that you now add the smell of zillion people, the drains from bottom and fumes from top.  By 7 o´clock the day is over and it is pitch black outside...you have the picture ?

So to light up at least our life indoors we have just been to Ikea to buy some stronger lightbulps for our kitchen. The family who used to live in here before was also from Germany and did not only install nice looking lamps but also managed to somhow set up a dimmer (which honestly was a selling point to me when we looked at the apartment :-). But it was never really bright enough.

So we went up a couple of watts and invested into some enviromentaly friendly light bulps.The result we just got was: Our kitchen is a disco! It appears that the electric circle can´t handle energy saving light bulps and every time we try to fix a new light bulp we either end up with a a ballroom effect when the light is switched on - or even better - the socket sparks when the light is switched off!!

So it seems like we have to be brave, and continue living in a slightly winter-like but cosy enviroment (depending how cool you turn the aircondition you can actually achieve that effect)... or we just escape the city for a couple of days and hope for some sunshine in Nanjing this weekend :-)

And if that doesn´t help than there is a plane waiting soon to take us back to enjoy the European for a while, hooray!