It's autumn in Shanghai

The days are getting noticeably shorter and it has been really cold since the weekend. The first snow fell in Beijing, which is too early at the beginning of November for the capital in the north as well.

Everyone warned me about the winter in Shanghai. Now it is time. It is cold and the next night the temperatures should drop to 1 degree. The problem is that there are no heaters here. Shanghai is located in southern China, where cooling is more important than heating. Air conditioners can also heat, so you can survive the time. One can imagine the climate in Shanghai roughly as in Rome or south of it. But there are a few weeks here that are uncomfortable. The border between southern and northern China is the Yangtze River, on whose delta Shanghai is located, i.e. exactly on the border between south and north, but on the south side, which means that the city is assigned to southern China. An old rule says that there is no heating south of the Yangtze. Would there be heating if it was a few kilometers further north, i.e. in northern China? At Uniqlo a week ago, when you could still sit outside in a t-shirt, I saw tons of winter clothes, so that I was wondering whether I was here in Shanghai or in a winter sports resort. Now I know why so many warming items are sold and I am really glad that I took my colleagues' warnings about winter seriously and went shopping two days before it started. Scarf, hat, warm shirts - a full range. Long johns wouldn't have been wrong either, sitting in an unheated office for hours, not moving. When I went outside this morning, it was actually wonderful - so clear and cold with a cloudless sky with a low morning sun.

In autumn and winter, it gets dark early in eastern China. The Middle Kingdom is large and theoretically would have four time zones, like Europe from Moscow to Lisbon. But there is only one time in all of China. Since Shanghai is on the east coast, the sun rises and sets early here. In the west of Central Asia, on the other hand, it becomes light or dark much later. When it is 9 p.m. here and you are slowly getting tired because the darkness has been stimulating the release of melatonin for hours, it is still bright as day in eastern Xinjiang and 9 p.m.

Autumn evening in Shanghai - appears like the film "Blade Runner" , 1982

In late autumn, when dusk comes very early, you can feel a bit lost in Shanghai. My way to the metro leads along an expressway on which the cars rush past me. Luminous traffic signs in different colors and Chinese characters show the way, somewhere in the distance a police siren sounds, passers-by rush past me anonymously and when I see the high-rise buildings the thought creeps into me that in these thousands of apartment towers there are fates and biographies behind every window.

The light is often dim, the subway does not have the charm of European subways, but it looks cold, it is the pulse that pumps 10 million people through the megacity every day, nothing more. The East Asian megacities seem somehow strange to Europeans, but also fascinating.