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Posts Tagged ‘ rain ’

Jen and I have spent the past week along the Southeast coast of Vietnam. The plan was to get in some serious bikini and wave time before heading to the cooler parts of the north. Massages on the beach, drinking from coconuts, that kind of thing. The weather in Saigon had been hot and humid for the past couple of months so I expected to be gently bronzed by the end of our beach adventures…

I foolishly never even considered that the weather could take a turn for the worst. The past week has shown us how rainy, windy and cool the coast of Vietnam can be, in the supposed dry season. There’s nothing quite like being caught in a tropical rainstorm on a motorbike in nothing more than a t-shirt, shorts and flip flops.

So, what have we been doing instead, you ask? To be honest, we’ve watched a LOT of movies. Vietnam thankfully has HBO and StarMovies and super cheap black market DVD’s. I’ve eaten excessive amounts of snacks such as fresh mango, jackfruit chips and Oreos. I’ve caught up on my reading and it’s almost time for another trip to the bookstore. And we’ve slept in every day, which has left us uber-relaxed (Jen augments this with daily naps as well). It’s not exactly what I imagined for this part of Vietnam, but we’re making the most of it and it’s sure making me happy. And in the end, anything’s better than working! And I have a feeling that the weather will soon take a turn for the better…

The almost deserted beach at Nha Trang.

It’s really amazing to me that you can live in the middle of a city hit by major flooding, caused by “the worst rain in 80 years”, and have no idea until friends from the states email you asking if you’re ok. We’re up on a pretty huge hill, so if our neighborhood was to flood, it would likely be the Apocalypse anyway. Still, I take the metro bus (like the green bus covered in water from all the pictures) every day to work and pass right through the area that was hit by flooding and I still barely noticed it. This morning there was a large area of low lying land that looked more like a lake than usual, but it wasn’t anywhere close to the roads. It wasn’t until my trip home when I saw that most of the water had cleared away leaving lots of rubbish and a few passengers pointed and chattered, though what they said I don’t know. Looking at the pictures online, you’d think the whole of Istanbul had been leveled under flood waters, which just goes to show that a photo doesn’t always tell the whole story.