When It Rains, It Pours

Nine months out of the year, it's hellishly hot in western Saudi Arabia, and during that time, there's so little condensation that if it 'rains', it usually comes down as dirty globs of spittle for about an hour and then stops completely. Luckily, from November to January, the weather is actually very pleasant, and occasionally, it actually rains proper rain...which tends to lead to utter fucking chaos, since there isn't the proper infrastructure to deal with it!

Recently, at our school, a few minutes into the fourth block, it started to rain--not in the aforementioned "spittle" way, but real, honest-to-goodness, civilized world kind of rain. Of course, all of the trainees rushed to the window to witness this most wonderful of natural phenomenons, as if it was the first time in their lives they have ever witnessed such an event. Water? From the SKY? What strange magic is this? Basically, once it starts raining, there's a camel's chance in Siberia that the students (being a mere twenty-two years old, on average) will be able to pay attention, or go to the next class.

And so it was when in really started coming down. Now this building wasn't built with rain in mind, so there are electrical outlets on the floors--like actually coming out of the floor itself. And, rain has a habit, in some classrooms of coming in through closed windows, pooling on the floor, and creeping towards the electrical outlets. Such was my concern while the students all crowded outside to check out the rain. We ended up cutting off the electricity to the buildings and letting the students go, which was kind of nice, because we got half of the day off too.

I took the opportunity to drive around with a colleague and take pictures of the city. For a while, I felt like Rabigh wasn't so bad, after all.

Riding around, we could see big pools of water here and there, on and off the street. Not surprising, seeing as how there are no storm drains, or even a sewer system in Rabigh. Also not surprisingly, we saw a couple car accidents. Bonus: while driving around, we saw a herd of camels too!

All in all, it was a pleasant afternoon off, and all thanks to Saudis having no idea how to cope with rain. It happened again Sunday morning, so school was cancelled again...even though it turned out to be a sunny day. The best part: this was all on the heels of the king asking everyone to pray for rain!