Lightning over the skies of Milan

The air suddenly gets cooler, and I sense that the flashes that fill the edge of my vision aren't the usual TV rays seeping through the windows of my neighbors in front, or the lights from the one "skyscraper" of Milan that can be seen from our front windows. It's a natural phenomenon, more majestic than simple artificial lights. Two air masses are colliding over the skies of Milan.

Lightning storms always make me mad happy. I am fascinated and excited by them. So I run to the balcony and start to observe, oooh-ing and aaah-ing at each flash. One mass is straight in front of me. I realize that the other one is coming from behind my building, so it's still out of sight. All I see are flashes reflected around and on the windows of the tall building.

Lightning arches behind the clouds and creates stark outlines of the plump cotton-like fluffs, heavy with rain, and quickly pushed around by the wind. Once in a while, the angry tail slash of a lightning outreaches beyond the outline and peeks at me, creating images of angry battles between giant electric iguanas.

I sense a rhythm. Flashes on one side. Answering flash from the other. Two flashes. One. One. Two. One. One two three! One. Half. Hi. Hey. You're in my way. No, *you* are in *my* way. Oh yeah? Wanna fight? Look at this! Ha! Take that! What do you have to say to that?!

And then I start humming the tune from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". It actually fits nicely. I wondered if Steven Spielberg had taken a hint from nature for his inspiration.

So after I take a few pictures and decide to write about this, I check IMDB. It turns out I wasn't so off the mark. According to their trivia on the movie, he was "[...] partly inspired by an experience from [his] childhood where without warning his parents rushed the family into their car, drove to an area where many others were gathered, and watched a spectacular meteor shower."

Nature is cool :) And the little lightning animation I posted here doesn't do it justice. But I wanted to share ^_^