Rainy Season in Korea

Rainy season is upon us here in the ROK. WE have not seen the sun for more than about an hour in almost 2 weeks now. I've had to give up riding my bike to school as I cannot ride and hold my umbrella at the same time. I've been walking and taking cabs when the rain is more like a monsoon! I've learned that cab drivers will stop for foreigners only when the weather is nice. They like to make us suffer when we will get wet. I usually end up walking half way on the worst of days before a taxi will finally stop for me. Of course on these days, they like to add to my frustration by insisting that my Korean speaking skills have somehow reverted to non-comprehensible! Funny, I've never had a hard time before getting a cab driver to understand two words: Imeong Hakyo, the name of the village Imseong, and Hakyo means school. I've learned in the last two weeks its not even worth trying to add "elementary" to hakyo because that's just too hard for them to understand even though we are the ONLY school out here!!!

I decided to bring the camera to school with me yesterday to document the incredible amount of rain that falls in one night. There is only one road leading to and from my school and last week it was flooded, which was pretty surprising to me since the roads are raised at least a meter above the rice fields around it, and there are ditches at least a meter deep on either side of the road. After 5 minutes of repeatedly trying to direct the cab driver yesterday, he stopped on the road leading to me school, about 300 meters short of where i needed to be dropped off. There were cars lined up on the street but i couldn't see why. When I saw people getting out and taking their shoes off to start walking I realised that the road was flooded again. I begged the cab driver to keep driving as I was not about to walk through the filthy water in an area where I had seen a HUGE green snake last week (we're talking at least a meter and a half long and at least 2 inches in diameter! -yikes!). So the cab drove on and got me to my school which was just on the other side of the flooding. Here are the pictures I managed to take, along with some pictures I took this morning as the flooding has subsided.

This picture is a bit deceiving... the water isn't actually up to the windows of the cab but that is a field along side the road that is just completely flooded from the early morning rain.

The fence in the background is the entrance to my school. You can faintly see the principal and vice-principal, who were standing at the entrance to make sure all the kids got through the water safely to school.

Above: Here are some of the walkers and my cab going back into town.

Below: The same road today -- no rain last night!

This here that looks like a lake is normally rice fields. The red in the background is the post office that i usually go to to send pen pal letters home to Em. Normally, there is a sidewalk/path that runs along the telephone poles - you can see the end of the path that yesterday led right into the lake!

Below is a picture of the same field, taken today. There is still a lot of water in the fields but you can now see the tips of the rice plants.

This is the ditch along the side of the road beside my school. The perspective isn't great, but the ditch is still half full of water. The ditch is at least a meter deep and the rice fields are on a raised beds - like steps all the way up to the mountain.