Pre-Monsoon Season

Last week, when at noon, minutes before the kindergarten teachers poured out the doors into the spring sunshine, the sky opened up and buckets, buckets of rain fell for a good twenty minutes. Finally, it slowed to a drizzle that lasted for a week.

I found out later that we are in "pre-monsoon season" or "plum rain." For a week or so, it should rain nearly non-stop, but with kinds of rain I have never seen. When the drizzle becomes a proper rain, huge, heavy drops of rain pour down. It usually only lasts a half hour or less, but is nevertheless an amazing amount of rain: the empty swimming pool at the apartment was half full after two days of rain. I walked a half a block to a tea shop, got caught in the rain and came back looking like I had fallen into said pool.

Yesterday afternoon however, the clouds cracked and the sun came out for the first time in a week and a half. Keep your fingers crossed that the worst of it is over...until typhoon season begins anyway...