Rainy Season

So.  The rainy season, right?  Yeah, me too.  I’ve heard of it.  People keep telling me about it.  “Whoa,” they say, “We’re sure sorry for you guys (referring to all the new 2012 starters).  We haven’t seen rain like this for foooooooooooour years.  No, sirree, no rain, not like this, uh huh, mmm hmm.”  Then they spit into a spittoon and continue to rock on their creaky rocking chairs in the staff room.  Most of them wear checked shirts and have a tobacco pouch squashed up in their breast pocket.

But, y’know… I’m British and we kinda, y’know, “get” rain.  The Swedes have 50 different words for snow; so too do we for rain.  We’ve got cats and dogs in our rain.  We’ve got aristocracy named after wellies and puddles in which to put them to good use.  We’ve got that misty-type rain that sooaaaks ya raaaight through.  We’ve got wet playtime and downpours and the light sprinkly rain that seems oblivious of the otherwise pleasant weather and therefore results in rainbows over meadows through which we can frolic.  We’ve got brollies and macs-in-sacs and anoraks and ducks that quack.  We’ve got rain on Christmas day every year when what we really want is snow.  We’ve got waterproof mascara for all of these occasions that never works.  We’ve got rain scheduled for every bank holiday for the last and next four millennia.  We’ve got insurance companies intelligent enough not to insure against flood damage.  Rain is so abundant in our country that our indigenous peoples didn’t even invent a god for it.  It wasn’t desired: it was just there and always will be.

So, Vietnam, you might have been trying to impress me with all this water and stuff and I’ll admit, your thunder is cool, as is your dry lightening.  Sometimes I even stop my lessons to point it out to the kids who shrug, disinterestedly.  If this happened at the Monkey, Hunter, Banana Academy, you’d have a riot on your hands: the boys would probably throw themselves out of top floor windows in their excitement over thunder such as you have, Vietnam.

Riding around on a moped with your eyes closed because the rain is driving into your face and it stings is less cool though, but it’s okay because your people are such sensible drivers, that I trust them not to career into me.

This is what I thought until this:

 

It doesn’t come up as well in the photos, but look! That's the ROAD, guys - that thing that looks like the river.  WOW.  That is some pretty impressive flooding you’ve got there, Vietnam.  I wasn’t expecting it at all.  If I had known it was going to be that bad, I would have taken a taxi.  Or slept at school: my classroom is air conditioned, and there’s coffee and a fully stocked fridge in the staffroom.  But no!  I pootled home and suddenly found myself – on Little Moto – mid-calf deep in enormous rivers of water that lasted for the whole of Thao Dien.  I refer to this because thanks to various hilarious postings and shameless marketing, I now have a Saigon-expat readership and as such can now include titbits of Insider Knowledge.  Thao Dien is like, a way long street in An Poo, where school is and it was all flooded.  Really badly.  You could tell it was really bad because even when I dropped down to second gear and pushed slowly forward through the ocean in front of me like a slightly less cumbersome and more drowned-rat Titanic, the taxis behind me didn’t even honk their horns.  They just followed me slowly, respecting the fear and dawning realisation that if the whole of Little Moto’s engine was under water, it was more than possible that it would cut out at any second, leaving me to tumble sideways, missing the curb and drown slowly with an expression of mild surprise, in the three foot bath tub that the street had become.

Wow.

I am completely way impressed by this and will be talking to my students about it tomorrow.  Especially my extra English kids, because I managed to convince them that when the streets flood like this we will all get cholera and pooh ourselves to death.  True say, guys.  True say.