WTF Wednesday- Sandstorm

This picture might have you asking, WTF? Me too. Turns out, there was a sandstorm in Beijing Saturday. The sky was bright orange as you can see from this picture. As a journalist, I have to give credit to Xinhua photographers for this. I was not dumb enough... er uh should I brave, yes, that's the word, to go out in said sandstorm.

You could definitely smell it. The air in my apartment tasted like dirt. Blowing your nose yielded chunks of brown. I had my windows open just a crack and the floors in my kitchen and bathroom had a thin veil on them- just like these cars. It was very weird.

When I did go outside later in the day, I wore a scarf wrapped around my head and sunglasses. My friend Jeremy called me Jihad Gretchen. Funny shit. I wasn't the only one who was trying to protect my lungs....

Beijing was oddly quite that day. It was truly a WTF moment. To read more about the sandstorm, I posted an article from Xinhua from Saturday. Of course, everything in there is the absolute truth and shouldn't be taken as a grain of salt, or should I sand?

BTW- I have no idea was microgrammes per cubic meter means.

BEIJING, March 20 (Xinhua) -- A severe sandstorm that plagued northwestern China in the past few weeks arrived in Beijing Friday night, packing strong winds and tonnes of sand.

Beijingers woke up to see clouds of yellow dust in the air Saturday morning. The loose soil and dust that had traveled hundreds of miles blanketed Beijing's streets, covering parked vehicles, bikes, roofs and even plants and making its way into apartment buildings.

Before it arrived in Beijing, the sandstorm had wreaked havoc Friday in the northwestern provinces of Gansu and Qinghai, as well as the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

An official with Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau said the sandstorm arrived in Beijing at midnight and was moving towards the southeast.

"The maximum density of granule we observed as more than 1,500 microgrammes per cubic meter," said Wang Xiaoming.

The density hovered above 1,000 mg per cubic meter in Beijing's city proper Saturday morning, causing serious pollution.

Though the daily pollution report is not immediately available, the weather bureau has already ranked Saturday's air quality a rare level 5 on its website, meaning it was hazardous with pollution reading over 301.

Most parts of the city was battered by strong winds Saturday. In Changping District in the northern suburbs, wind swpet at up to 100 km per hour.

The sandstorm, which wreaked havoc in the northwestern Xinjiang, Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia and Inner Mongolia in the past week, also battered Tianjin, Hebei, Shanxi and Shandong Saturday.