My Rain

So, this is what the last week of the rainy season looks like this year. Crazy storm hit yesterday and is still raging.

It reportedly rained over 70mm, around 3 inches, during a two-hour storm late yesterday afternoon. We were stuck in Hyehwa waiting for the rain to stop enough for us to ride the scooter home. But yesterday's sudden downpour is nothing compared to the early morning storm.

The storm that began in the earliest hours today and thrashed us with early morning lightning and thunder for 90 minutes has almost certainly dumped yesterday's rain two times over.

I put on my swimming trunks and cleaned the walls and windows outside the apartment that were filthy from Seoul's daily dirt, and beginning to mold and mildew from the two months of rainy season weather. That kind of green is not welcome.

According to estimates, it'll have rained somewhere around 600-700mm by Thursday when the storm is supposed to begin to clear out. That's around a foot of rain in 48 hours. I think those estimates were made at the beginning of the storm and may increase.

Three o'clock yesterday afternoon, the humidity was intense and as the sun set it cooled off quick producing intense storms. The picture above is typical of what happened around the city. It's the heaviest rainstorm in Seoul since I moved here in 2008.

We live on a hill, so no flooding here. I'm sure Dorimcheon--the river down the street--is swollen, if not dumping its excess into the lowest streets

It's a fitting storm for my birthday, I think. It's like a long-waning wail against the oppressive summer heat.

See 장마