Rain

Everything in this country is sopping wet right now. If it is not the rain it is the humidity. You would think that the rain would cool things down a bit. Nope!

This is a road we take to church on Sundays.
Click it to see it the day before flooding.

Last week it rained every day. It poured a few of those days. The river almost overflowed. In some areas it did overflow. You may have even heard about it on the news.

So, there is a gigantic river that runs through Seoul, the Han River. It is massive! Well, this week it was doubly so. I think it doubled in size. There are highways along each side of this massive river that set quite a ways above the normal water mark. There was so much water that it came up over these highways in spots. All of the river parks were completely submerged. I was surprised that it could swell that high above its normal height; this is a massive river we are talking about! There are a bunch of bridges over this river and in Korean they are called daegyo meaning BIG bridge. There is a lot of dirty water flowing down this river when it has not been raining for weeks. To think that how much rain water it collected to get it the size it was last week. That's a lot of rain. That is a lot of rain cloud.

There was so much rain Tuesday night that the street Bee and I live off of was a river Wednesday morning when I left for work. A watershed of the hill we live against dumps out onto the street right across from our driveway. The water rushing out of that, combined with the water already in the road from some other watershed up the street, made for a several inch thick flow all the way down the street, and there is a pretty good slope to our street (I wish I would have thought to take a picture). It made for a lake at the bottom of the hill where our street meets the main road.

I drove to work that morning because I had to be in Yongsan 40 minutes away and I picked the wrong way to go. The river had crested the highway I was on in a spot and all the freeway traffic was being diverted onto the road that I chose to take to get there. I was not too bad; it only added twenty minutes to my commute. It is a good thing I left early, except I only left twenty minutes early. I should have picked the south side of the river.  I am pretty sure I did see a couch floating down the river though, along with all sorts of other debris.
At work one of the parking lots flooded but I do not feel too bad for the person whose car was was soaked up to the hood because there are signs all over in that parking lot that say "Area subject to flooding." The day of a torrential downpour is not the day to park your car in that lot. I must say that the drainage system her in Seoul is rather effective because everything recedes quickly after the rain. But no matter how effective it can still only handle so much rain in a short amount of time.