Category: Landscape

I am back from a trip to the UK (teaching on a course and vacationing with CY after). Crazy weather conditions (the coldest UK winter in a century!) meant a trip peppered with adventures: icy, snow-covered roads that were treacherous to drive on, made worse with a hired car that refused to start on several occasions in the cold, and which refused to climb a slope leading to our B&B in the Lake District! On my third visit to Derwent Water at Keswick in 3 years, I found an entirely different scene due to the cold weather conditions. The surface of the lake has iced over with the surrounding hills covered in snowy white. One man decided even to take a risky walk along the ice, reaching far into the lake, making almost two-thirds on the distance towards the nearest shore! We had fun skimming pebbles on the hardened lake surface, as they bounced and slid their way along.

My impression of Shanghai is that the weather is generally gloomy (at least during my earlier visit in June this year). I had better luck with my most recent trip at the end of October, managing actually to catch a “urbanesque” sunset at the Shanghai World Expo two days before its official closure. According to Dad’s friends in Shanghai, great sunsets are hard to come by in the city. I was fortunate to catch this one as the sun descended rapidly over the urban landscape.