Flood!

It's been raining and raining for days now, which even the locals say is strange, since this sort of rain should have been done and gone with by the end of July. That's when the rainy season ends, after all. On Monday morning traffic was awful because a low bridge (which sits right on top of the river, actually) was closed due to the torrents that poured down on Sunday. I was out and about (meeting someone for lunch and then someone else for a museum outing) on Sunday, and my legs were soaked up to my knees.

Today, however, people were getting soaked up to their knees because they were wading through water -- on the sidewalk. After work I found out that my short-term tutoring job (he leaves tomorrow for the States) had canceled our meeting for today, so I decided to get some work done at a coffeeshop in Gangnam, a hip, coffee-shoppy type of place. Because of the people lining the stairs, hoping that the rain would let up, I had to fight my way out of the subway station. I saw a swirl of water as I stepped onto the last step, but figured, "Oh, these wussy commuters! It's just water, people," and strode out...

...into a small river. I couldn't see the curb of the sidewalk; the water, grayish brown, covered two thirds of the sidewalk and all of the street. I thought that perhaps I'd just push on ahead anyway and just dry off in a coffee joint, but then I saw people trudging through the water. It nearly reached their knees.

A motorcyclist, unfazed, stopped and waited for the pedestrians to get out of his way before merrily continuing down the sidewalk (motorcycles are the amphibians of Seoul -- not simply because they bulldoze through rain, sleet and heat, but also because they zip along the street and the sidewalk with equanimity).

I backed up under the awning of a Dunkin' Donuts (yes, they're here) and watched the spectacle for a while. Once in a while, a wave rippled through the river and pushed the edge of the water nearly to the step I was standing on. A lot of people around me were on their cell phones, exclaiming about the situation. A man dressed in a suit strode through the water, clearly having accepted that he was going to have to take this suit to the cleaners. Traffic on the street was hopeless, and the water level hit halfway up the tires of the vehicles helplessly waiting for the snarl to untangle.

Judging from extent of the flooding, the pipes were simply overwhelmed, and couldn't process the serious downpour that followed several other days of steady rainfall. I eventually decided that I'd go somewhere else, though I was a little nervous about taking the subway, actually. But I made it safely to the mall and studied for a few hours, and then went to my language exchange partner's house. The rain had let up a little by then, but the entrance to the subway station closest to her house had been sandbagged. Likewise the doorway to a nearby bank. Dang!
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Someone at work said to me today that it took a long time to find me for my position, and that it would probably take a long time again to find a good candidate this time. "So maybe you can just apply again," he said. Hee hee!