Rain and more rain

Did anyone ever think that it rains in Yemen, especially in August? Well, it does. There have been very short and heavy showers in the last few days - it is officially rain season, after all - but nobody and nothing seems to have been prepared for what happened today. The rain started at about 4:30 in the afternoon - first very gently, almost pretending to be harmless, but then, within minutes, it quadrupled in strength and quickly turned the whole town into an intricate network of streams, brooks and rivers (formerly roads, lanes and streets) flowing at great speed to lower grounds. It was quite spectacular to see the persistance with which the traffic was defying water, which came in two forms: as a hellish downpour from above and as a river with ever-increasing water levels from below. I was tempted to join the kids that were jumping around in the puddles, which quickly covered the ground and connected together to create lakes of brown soup with plastic-bottle-and-rubbish dumplings.
Most memorable was the bit of road that leads from the city centre to the suburb of Haddah, where I'm living: it used to be the runway of Sana'a airport until the 70s, and is therefore incredibly broad (probably more than 15 lanes on either side, but not marked as such), flat and in unusually good condition. But for some reason it has tribunes on the side, so it must have acted as a race-track, too, at some point. So it was just getting dark when the rain started and the flat asphalt area of the former runway was rapidly covered with several centimeters of water. Many cars, slowly working their way through the water masses, put their hazard-lights, giving the scene an eerie and emergency-type lighting. Several small groups of people had collected under the roof of the tribunes, making them look like those at a badly attended training game of a mediocre small-town football team. A jeep showed off his superior position in such conditions as he whizzed past the slower and lesser equipped traffic participants, splashing water several meters high and wide to both sides. He was considerate and kind enough to use one of the outer 7 lanes.

The mini-buses , which are the cheapest and easiest way to travel (that is, if you know where they're going to and where they're leaving from) were still driving with their slide doors open, as always, but showed a considerable decrease in customers.

Nobody seemed to be terribly suprised by the whole thing, except Arnaut and I. We took our sandals off and ran around like crazy, checkin out, where the water was deepest, evading the gigantic splashes of the faster cars, wading through rapid streams to cross the roads, taking lots of pictures of cars and people and shouting out aloud.

The children loved driving their bikes at full speed from dry side-roads into the flooded main roads and putting their feet up just before they hit the water. The braver ones continued to treadle, not to loose speed so quickly and made a sport out of not-loosing-your-sandals-as-you-treadle-through-the-water.