Real or Manufactured?

These last few days it's been really humid -- 28 degrees and not much relief in the evenings.

However the weather changed completely today.

This morning it looked overcast as usual, but by 9:30am the sky was ominously dark as you can see in the first photo. It looked like it was 7pm.

And then it came -- bolts of lightning followed by the crack of thunder, and then the rain. It poured so hard you could hardly see anything clearly outside.

My lunch date with a girlfriend was cancelled and the thought of wading through muddy water to the gym was hardly inspiring.

Amazingly things cleared up in the late afternoon and the middle picture (from a very dirty window) was taken at around 4:30pm.

I ducked out for groceries and breathed in the fresh air. Beijing is best right after a big hard rain. Everything -- the sky, buildings, trees, cars, roads and flowers have all had a good rinse and look bright a new again.

And to compensate us for the inconvenience caused, we were rewarded with a beautiful sunset around 7:30pm.

Some conspiracy theorists like to say some of our rain showers are "manufactured" -- these special rockets shot into the air dispersing microscopic seeds to encourage the clouds to gather and rain.

They claim a "clean rain" is manufactured, whereas a dirty one -- where roads are clogged, streets muddy, then it's a real rain.

I don't know what to make of today's rain except that it was a long time coming. If it was indeed manipulated, hope those guys at the meteorological station have perfected their art in time for the Beijing Olympics...