The bleakness of air pollution

The air pollution in Yerevan has worsened since the past week. To the point where if you open the window and inhale just once you'll feel the tightness within the lungs. It's nasty, and something I've ever experienced before. This means being stuck at home, not going out at all due to the dangers it holds. Online it states that the air quality is nearly 40 times the recommend air quality measurement. Reaching into genuinely being hazardous to health. The density of this nasty air created such a thick cloud around that the visibility is gone. And it's worsening as the day progresses. Supposedly a concentration of something called PM2.5 which is a series of small hazardous particles which are damaging to the body. To take these photographs I had to really up the aperture to pull something out of the depths, though by eye you can't see a thing.

In parts of the day the air would open up a bit, though it was still present, lingering around in lower clouds closer to the ground, followed by another strong cloud that would soon creep on in and hide all details of the world around. It was a strange feeling looking from the balcony, where the world just stopped in a way. You couldn't hear anything around even if the door or window was opened. The atmosphere was an odd one. Very eerie, like something you'd see from a horror film where the world is just coated in a blanket of fog, and the characters never know which direction they're heading in as a result, nor what could lurk just a few metres ahead of them. It made structures stand out more, the old smoke stacks of the Soviet Union hidden in view, the landscape giving off the feeling that some buildings in the distance were just floating above.

Eventually the rain appeared. It made things worse as the rain pulled more of that nasty air around. It got cold, even indoors you could feel that sudden temperature drop. The darkness swallowing things up to the point of artificial lighting turning on a bit earlier than usual. You couldn't quite see it in camera at this distance, but the beams of light punching through the smog would craft its own shapes reaching down to the ground. Car lights of triangular shapes gave off the feeling of a mist filter over the lens like I would otherwise usually use. Here it wasn't really needed. It was oddly cinematic in that sense, though not the best way to see or get that sort of environment!

Around you might see the brief parts of lights in buildings nearby turning on too. A strange shape that would emerge from the darkness. Again as if these locations were just floating within the sky, a strange shape of light. Some signs of life around that wasn't just you. I do hope this clears up soon though, I want to get out a bit more. And with this air quality being 40 times the recommended average, I don't think many regular masks are going to help.