Yellow Sand decends upon Seoul

The sky looked ominously black all day yesterday and kept me from checking out the St. Patrick's Day celebrations downtown (yes, they even celebrate St. Patrick's Day in Korea), but somewhere around 4 or 5 the sky started to change to a new color, Yellow. If you check out the US Army's Asian Dust monitoring system, you can see the spike into dangerous levels for that hour or two yesterday afternoon. Fortunately, for today, it has dipped back to normal, low levels.

If you've never heard of Asian Dust, it's basically sand that is picked up by wind in the desert in China, swept through the toxic air of China, where it picks up all sorts of toxins, and then sweeps over Korea and Japan and reeks havoc on the lungs of unsuspecting folks. On heavy dust days, everyone wears masks around the streets.


This was the exact color of the sky yesterday at 6 o'clock. This was the best photo I could get... Roboseyo got a much better photo while he was in Busan yesterday.