Post a Comment On: Kaffee und: [Kuchen]

It's 9:00am, Julia left for work 2 hours ago, and I'm listening to the morale-building going on outside one of the real-estate offices across the street. The workers in the office building kitty-corner to us often file out and do calisthenics in the parking lot early in the morning. But every morning these real-estate agents line up in two rows (one of men, one of women) on the sidewalk and do cheerleading routines involving chants, clapping, singing, and hand gestures, often to music.

The heat and humidity are already up; the former due mostly to two rare days of clear skies over the weekend. I no longer trust my key-chain thermometer as I have long suspected that it always reads between 27 and 29 degrees. I attribute this defect to the photograph I took of it maxed out at 50 degrees in northern Australia nearly 3 years ago. Google, however, says it is 27 degrees and 74% humidity right now... not bad for nine in the morning. It's amazing to me that a place can be this humid in the summer (wait for August!) and so dry in winter. If the heat doesn't dehydrate you here the air conditioning will and I wake up every morning with a dry throat.

The clear skies this weekend probably came thanks to the rain on Friday (rain seems to settle the fine particulate pollution). Julia and I met for dinner after work on Friday and then decided to go to a movie. As we emerged from the restaurant, it began to rain lightly. As we emerged from the taxi and sprinted to the cinema, it began to rain heavily. Forty minutes later, as our film was about to start, they informed us that Cinema 6 was being shut down because of water flooding into it and that we could get our money back. Upstairs, parts of the street were now flowing like rivers as the rain alternately poured and paused in 5-minute cycles. After half an hour trying to find a taxi that was (a) empty, (b) willing to pick us up (not sure why this is a problem), and (c) closer to us than to somebody else looking for the same thing, we gave up and walked to the subway. Unfortunately the subway was closed, due (as far as we could tell) to flooding. Tiring of waiting, we crossed the street and attempted to decipher the bus system. We did eventually manage to get close enough to home that we could walk the rest of the way, having become wet enough by then that we'd given up caring about staying dry anyway. In total, it took us two full hours to get home... this city doesn't deal well with heavy rain.