Friday, December 16, 2005

If you listen to people too much, your thoughts are colored by their perceptions.

Seattle is fairly notorious among non-Seattle vasis for being a rainy and depressing place. Right. This is my first winter here, and it isn’t half as bad as people say it is. Of course, there are the days when it is very cloudy and dull, and there is light, incessant rain. But that happens maybe 10 days out of 30 in a month. The rest of the time, it is tolerable (think of Pune in August, only much colder and with 4 PM sunsets).

However, the few days when the sun does come out (like it did most of last week, and part of yesterday), are the most gorgeous days of the year. There’s of course the cold, but the sight of the snow-covered Cascades (or the Olympics, depending on where you are and which direction you are looking) make for the most awe-inspiring sight.

I've never lived this close to tall mountains, and it gets a tad overwhelming at times. For some reason, turning on to 51st street during my morning drive, when I get this awesome view of the Cascades, U2's "Beautiful day" runs through my mind.

"See the world in green and blue
See China right in front of you
See the canyons broken by cloud
See the tuna fleets clearing the sea out
See the Bedouin fires at night
See the oil fields at first light
And see the bird with a leaf in her mouth
After the flood all the colors came out "

Yeah, it's a beautiful day.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Ajay,
I noticed Amit Varma linked to the Manjunath post on India Uncut.. thanks for mailing him abt it.

Ajay said...

No problems. I thought it deserved wider distribution than linking on my blog would give it :-)

Anonymous said...

Visibility in seattle is super! why, recently we have been seeing mount baker that is right next to canadian border almost 100 miles away, very clearly without any haze.