It was Emanuele who saw it first, a huge black plume of smoke billowing into the sky above Shanghai. 
We were walking down Jiangsu Lu and on reaching his apartment we went to the window to see better what was on fire. It had to be something big to create smoke of that magnitude. Not having ever seen a building of fire it was exciting in a way. I said to Emanuele that it would probably be on the local news later that day. Little did we know that it would be on the international news. As we watched the fire rage, 53 people were dying.