Eclipse!

In case you didn't hear, there was a pretty big solar eclipse visible across India and Asia today. :-)

Shanghai was considered on of the best places on earth to view the eclipse, the longest one of the century and something China hadn't seen since the Ming Empire. We heard that all kinds of people were going to be in town -- world-renowned astronomists, eclipse chasers, crazy people -- to watch it. Hotels and restaurants scheduled big parties and special "blackout" menus. And people scrambled to get eclipse viewing glasses.

I was on the fence about whether to try to find some glasses. If I was able to find them, how would I know for sure that they were legitimate? I wasn't really sure about trusting my retinas to the toothless guy sitting outside the metro station with a box of mylar sheets. If I did get a few good pairs of glasses, would there be any way to convince John and Betsy to keep them on? I decided that the safest bet was to let them watch it on CNN, though I was a little bummed. If they were just a little bit older, I might have packed them off to Century Park, one of the few unobstructed viewing places in our part of town.

As it turns out, I didn't need to worry. After more than a week of blue skies, the clouds rolled in late last night and we woke up to heavy storm predictions and reports of more than a few bummed and broke eclipse enthusiasts. Bad news for them, but great news for me and the kids, as we were able to stand out on our balcony and watch the eclipse without worrying about permanent blindness. We didn't get to see the sun and the actual eclipse because of all the cloud cover and rain, but it was amazing to watch the skies turn to black in the middle of the morning. We did keep CNN on in the background, just to see if their predictions of when we would "plunge into absolute darkness!" were accurate.

Many of our neighbors were outside on their balconies watching and taking pictures, but even more people were just going about their regular business. The taxi line outside the compound kept up a steady pace, and people walked through the grounds like any other morning at 9:45.

The kids may not remember much of it, and the pictures I took are pretty sad from an aesthetic standpoint, but we can say that we were there in Shanghai for the great eclipse of 2009.

(Enable the captions -- the little post-it looking thing -- to see the time stamp on the pictures)