Weather déjá vu!

Yesterday Ann and I had to make a trip into town for yet another fun-filled adventure with Portugal’s bureaucracy.  Anyway, as we stepped out (well, something we’d actually noticed earlier in the morning), everything seemed really odd.  The sky was . . . call it overcast, and everything was a bit . . . bright and a bit yellowish.  Here’s kind of what it looked like:

Now, Braga, like Eugene, is in a bit of a bowl-like valley.  So we’re used to inversions - weather inversions where the smoke from heaters or outdoor grills creates a smoky, smelly smog, the smoke from fires getting socked in the valley, or even periods where the haze just builds up and won’t escape.  This was fundamentally different.

“Hon, you know what this reminds me of?  In Liberia we would get this event called the Harmattan - a giant front blowing sand down from the Saraha that would turn the skies a bit orangish and would last a few days before it cleared.”  

I did a blog post on the Harmattan that you can find here. And here’s a photo I took from one of the apartment building roof-tops during the Harmattan.

We’re on the top of Mamba Point looking down into Monrovia.  Yeah, you can’t see much.

Well, sure enough, that evening we start seeing the news stories.  Indeed, a giant storm has blown up from the Sahara and into Spain.  Yesterday, it made its way to Portugal.  There was a reason I thought it looked familiar, and I was right (I need to point that out so that Ann knows I’ve been right at least once in my life.)  By this morning, the visibility in Braga was just as bad as it was in Monrovia.  We’re used to seeing two more rows of hills and then mountains behind that hill below

And, you could smell and taste the desert sand in the air. It was a taste I knew not only from Liberia, but also from Iraq.  In Iraq they had these sand clouds float in occasionally.  I did a blog post about it here. From last night’s news accounts, Spain has had it much worse than us.  The photos from Spain look more like my Iraq photos than my Liberia photos.  Call us lucky I guess.  At least for now. 

Iraq of course also had sand storms and, as proven by yet another blog post I did that you can find here, had a weather forecast called “Dust.”  Yeah, things aren’t that bad here I guess.  Though it seems like the runners are heeding the air quality warnings . . . not a lot of joggers exercising the past couple of days.

As for us, every time I look out the window it feels a bit like we’re on Mars.