Who Needs the Beach?

I was just about to leave a friend’s house earlier when it started to POUR down rain. Like rain so hard you could barely see 5 feet our their front window. So I stayed and waited and played with their adorable 2 year old, Dea. And I waited some more. And waited some more. And after half an hour, when it hadn’t let up at all, I finally just decided to brave it and drive home.

That was an interesting choice. I’ve never driven in rain SO hard before – and that’s saying a lot. It took twice as long as normal to get home because every road – even the main bus/truck route through town – had turned into a raging river. LITERALLY, a river. And when I say “literally”, you can trust that I mean it, because one of my current pet peeves is when people misuse the word “literally”. At one intersection, I had to put my feet down and wait for some traffic to go by before I could pull out.

THE WATER WAS 3/4 OF THE WAY TO MY KNEES. It was running OVER the floorboard of my motorbike. As I left the main road and got back into my neighborhood, every street was like a tributary of water flowing into the next street. At every side street, I had to swerve to the middle of the road to avoid the white-capped rush of water flowing out. At no point during my drive home could I even see the asphalt. And I was thankful that I was driving on familiar roads, roads where the location of every speed bump and every pothole and every drainage grate was already etched into my memory.

I actually considered pulling over to take a picture, but it probably would have ruined my camera. And I really just wanted to get home and jump in a hot shower.

I did take these pictures though…

My front yard. It was almost knee deep in spots as well. I couldn’t even drive my bike through it to get to my normal parking spot. This is after only about 30 minutes of rain!

This is what I get for buying the most expensive rain jacket at Niki Baru, thinking it would be the best quality. Not so much… Too bad my last rain jacket got stolen. Or lost. Or something. It was a good one, and it only cost $3!

The floor inside the front door looked like this… But not anymore, because I already mopped it.

One of the culprits hiding from the thunder under the kitchen table. She looks funny in this picture without her ears.

So it’s Spring Break this week, and this is how I’m spending it. Driving in muddy monsoons and cleaning paw prints off the kitchen floor. Meanwhile, all my co-workers and friends are at the beach and are kind enough to regularly post pictures of their amazing vacations on a multitude of different social networking sites so that I will be sure to see them ALL.

Also, my one neighbor who lives in the thin-walled apartment adjacent to mine has a miniature poodle. I really hate poodles. But this one is OK most of the time. I’m used to it. Its one major fault is that if its owner leaves, it barks and whines until she returns home. This generally is not a problem as we are both at school at the same time, so I’m not home to hear the dog, and she rarely goes out in the evenings. But this week, she went to Lombok for Spring Break… Yeah… This dog has not stopped barking its high pitched little poodle bark since Saturday – except for when it is asleep. But it wakes up at 4 AM. And coincidentally, so do I now.

Spring Break hasn’t been all bad so far though. I went swimming with some friends this morning at a really beautiful infinity pool up the mountain. We swam from 9 – 10 in the morning, and it was cloudy. I still managed to get a pretty nice burn. Who even needs the beach?