It’s always damp in Shanghai. The city is built on a massive river delta, and there’s a permanent coating of fine black river silt on everything, like the black grime you see on the alloy wheels of cars. Combined with this black film, is the dirt, probably concrete dust from the never-ending, massive and dog-ugly construction sites of hundreds of 30 story apartment buildings and mega-factories – both soon to remain empty for years, derelict and in disrepair before they are even finished.
Of course, the construction of 6-lane, elevated highways add to this sense of living in a dirty building site. This big blob of spaghetti needs to be built to disgorge the mass of traffic that will commute to and from the empty projects.
But, hell, let’s keep building all this stuff so that the economy stays buoyant. This is a third world country on steroids and everyone wants a piece of the investment pie. God knows what will happen when the music stops.
So, back to the rain. Apart from the fact that you know that soon after the rain stops there will be new legions of killer mosquitoes, the rain is beautiful and so cleansing (sort-of), it washes the streets of all of this horrible grime, semi-cleaning the place until the next build-up of muck. The filthy rain-water spews into the rivers and ultimately colours the South China Sea a dark poo colour (but, because drainage is not recognised as being entirely necessary here – hell, you can’t make money from drainage) – highways tend to collect Olympic swimming pool-sized puddles of this toxic sludge, only to slowly drain away just in time for the next downpour.