Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Wet Streets

About half an hour after I expressed my perplexity with the weather yesterday, it became clear as to what was going on. Again with the wind! But this time it was followed by rain. Did I say rain? I meant RAIN! It was coming in off the water horizontally. We scrambled to close all the doors and windows again.



Have you ever heard thunder over open water? It is totally different from over land. It echos and grumbles and carries on as if it's in pain. Sometimes we get those cracks of thunder. The bull whip snap but only louder. Whenever we would get one of those it sent Simon rushing for my lap! He is such a scaredy cat. (could it be because I baby him something awful? Naw.) The show wasn't complete until we got lighting. I could see it as flashes of blue in the air. At one point, it hit close by with a loud Ka-boom but the electricity stayed on.



We had to run some errands downtown so we also stopped at our favorite loncheria next to the market for lunch. This is what the street looked like out front after all that rain.











Notice this guy. He is pretending to paddle through it. When he got up to me he said he wished he had a canoe!







By the time we finished lunch, the sun was out again. Brilliant and hotter than normal. All that moisture still in the air. The other streets downtown get it even worse than this one. Some of them are over knee deep as they wait for the water to slowly make its' way back out to sea. I love the rainy season downtown with the water swollen streets. I just don't like to walk in it. To say it is dirty is to put it mildly. All the garbage, wrappers, bottles, dog and cat poop, phlegm that people have spat out and piles of vomit by the bars all float merrily along. I love it though when the stupid tourists happily splash around in it. Then they wonder later how they possibly could have gotten sick. Mmmmm. Must have been the food!

3 comments:

Brenda Maas said...

The image of those tourists paddling through that water is sooo gross. Personally I never step into any running/standing water, even when I think that it is just a water leak, as it also could be a sewer leak. You never know what is in it and probably don't want to know.

John W said...

Ah, phlegm. I've noticed that Mexican men spit in the streets almost as often as people in Hong Kong. In Beijing, the government has launched a campaign to get people to abstain from spitting, not as a public health measure, but to improve the city's image during the Olympic Games.

As for litter, a couple years ago in San Miguel de Allende, the city installed trash bins and ran a public awareness campaign to combat littering. It pretty much worked. Our town is remarkably clean these days.

Islagringo said...

Brenda, we have actually seen tourists "swimming" in this water and having water fights with it. Yuk, they most certainly get it in their mouths. Fools, every last one of them!

John, our female Mayor is big on the anti-litter campaign here. I think I have written about that before. There are gangs of women who go around daily collecting trash off the streets. But, alas, more education is needed to stop people from littering in the first place. The island is cleaner than I have ever seen it though.