Shanghaied into Shanghai

I woke up this morning to a faint sound, something I must've heard dozens of times before, but rather bizarre and baffling in this setting of thousands of Shanghainese crammed into their sardine tin apartment blocks.

It was a cockerel, crowing lustily into the dazzling sunshine of a crisp Shanghainese morning.

I guess someone's having some rather good chicken soup for dinner this week.

So anyway I get out of bed, and it is the most gorgeous, brilliant spring day since I arrived in the midst of bleak and dreary post-CNY Shanghai. Birds everywhere are crooning the spring buds into waking, the city is rubbing its sleep-heavy eyelids, and that cockerel is loud enough to raise up anyone and anything still in hibernation, including my photography bug. Outside, the sudden proliferation of pink, white, and red blossoms infuse the lanes and paths and spaces with an invisible mist of exultation. The sunlight glistens off every surface as the city shrugs off its winter mantle, and the very air is evocative of magic and the promise of life.

After the initial weeks of settling-in stress, homesickness, loneliness, acclimatising, and cold, it is transcendent moments like this that make all that difficulty and discomfort so worthwhile.

La dolce vita, entirely in Chinese of course.