I had a friend visiting over the weekend. In a matter of days she’ll be moving to China which got us talking about my time there. It brought up a lot of memories and details which seemed lost somewhere in the back of my brain. Naturally, I grabbed my old hard drive to explore the hundreds of pictures left untouched since the trip. I barely made it through a dozen when I stopped on this one. This is from my first day in Beijing. There’s nothing like the first impression a place can make on you. These don’t always hold but they always seem to make their mark. After having spent weeks in the gobi desert that whole day in Beijing felt like an overdose of colours under a dirty and polluted sky. A little bit like this photo.