...And the Thunder Rolls

You know, just when you think you've got living in Asia all figured out....
Last night both Reyna and I had to work late.  I got home at about 8:00 and Reyna arrived shortly after, having made a trip to the grocery store.  Typical Thursday evening of eating dinner, cleaning out perpetually stinky cat boxes* and chatting/bitching about work and jerky cats was playing out.  Underneath a background score of thunder from an approaching storm played.

*Our cats have turned into assholes in the last year.  I don't mean that as a euphemism either.  All they do is eat and shit, which stinks up the house.  We've tried everything to corral the stink, but have not yet found a remedy.  The second the box is cleaned out, one of them goes and uses it.  Last night it took less than 45 seconds.

Around 9:30 we had assumed our couch positions, Reyna writing a spelling test on her computer at the base of the L, and me reading a book on the vertical.  The rain had started; a typical monsoon style downpour that we generally ignore*. 

*When we first moved out of the desert, I'd never seen rain as hard as here.  It rains so hard you can't see more than ten feet in front of you.  Plus, since most roofs here are metal, it's loud.  Our house is no different, but, like we say, there's really very little you can't get used to with enough exposure.

Then a drop hit my leg.

You see our house is tall.  Five floors in total.  If you sit on the couch on the second floor (Level 1 for you Asians that start with G instead of 1) you can look up through the hole made by the stairs and see the roof of the house.  Not the ceiling to a little insulated attic, the actual corrugated tin/fiberglass that protects us from the elements.  This allows sunlight to come into the house in the daytime and is typical of houses built in this style.

Within seconds it was raining in our living room nearly as hard as it was raining outside.  Water poured in as we rushed to move our three-week-old couch away from the deluge.  For a moment we stared at each other in disbelief.  I ran downstairs and grabbed Reyna's poncho, which we spread across the floor to protect the flimsy-as-hell wood veneer flooring in that room -the only room in the house without tile I'm sad to report).  We ripped the bags out of the trashcans on the first three floors of the house and tried to catch the water.  But it was like using a teacup to stop Niagara Falls.

I carefully, but quickly, raced up the stairs to survey the problem. There was a river of water running down the stairs making them slick like ice.  I slip-slided to the top floor, which was now about two inches deep with rain water, running down the stairs and falling into the rest of the house.  Every floor was wet.  The final load of laundry, the whites, I didn't get to on Sunday lay sodden on the floor in the middle of the chaos.

I raced back down the stairs and found Reyna with four trashcans filled with water and more than an inch on the floor across the entire living room.  I nearly laughed when I saw that she was using a tiny mop to sop up the water that was missing the buckets.  I continued down the stairs and out of the house to get our landlord neighbors before everything in the house was destroyed.

Everyone was in bed.  I did something I'd never do, and rang the doorbell even though their front door was closed.  Their daughter got up and I yelled, "our house is flooding! Help!"  She gave me a confused look.  "COME HELP US!" I shouted.  By then her father, who is our fix-it guy, who wears only boxers about 80% of the time, appeared putting his shirt on.  Together we made our way back to the house.

He took one look at the water coming into the living room and said " OH SHIT!"  This is from a guy who's English is marginal at best.  It was that bad.  We both ran up the stairs.  I tried to suppress visions of this 70+ year old man slipping on the stairs and breaking a hip, giving us a medical emergency to deal with in addition to our plumbing emergency.  When we got to the top floor he was moaning as if a family member had just died.  He rushed outside to the balcony that holds our water tank.  It was still pouring rain outside, and the water was still coming in as I tried to block it with a bath mat.  It was a desperate situation.  Ngo came back in and said in broken English that the drain had been blocked with debris, which had caused the balcony to flood and water to come in under the door, down the stairs and into our living room.  He had managed to unblock the drain and it was now working properly.

The source of the problem fixed, we began working to slow the flow of water down the stairs.  Using a towel and a broom, we managed to slow, and then stop the rainstorm in the living room.  In the middle of the action, I stopped to put the clothes, which had been sloshing around on the floor into the washer.  It feels pretty stupid to put already soaked clothes in the washer while standing in your flooding house during a violent rainstorm.  I thought, "I don't want my clothes to be in that water, I want it in this water."  These are the bizarre times in which we live.

I then went downstairs and spent the next hour helping Reyna and the neighbor's daughter mop up the water in the living room.  In the end, we filled ten 15L trashcans with water from the living room alone.  Incredibly none of our property was destroyed, although the jury is still out on the veneer flooring, which may have water under it.  We managed to limit the water on the couch by splitting it up and moving the pieces to opposite corners of the room.  Once the emergency had passed, we removed the slipcovers and hung them on various railings, along with Reyna's poncho, to dry.  Computers and other iDevices were all shuttled away moments after the flood began and were all in proper working order this morning.

By the time we fell into bed at midnight, we were chuckling about it.  Neither of us had ever experienced anything like it before.  We discussed that as bad as it was, it could have been so much worse.  It could have rained directly on the couch, a computer, or iPad.  The power could have gone out.  We could have been shocked by the 37 appliances we own.  It could have happened while we were not home.  That's the one that really made us shudder.  This morning, after we reassembled the couch and moved it back to it's normal spot, it was like nothing had happened.  It was almost hard to believe that just 7 hours earlier we'd been walking around with water threatening to rise to our ankles in the same room.

Of course, in the midst of the disaster, I paused for 25 seconds to record a video.  It's a little dark and I apologize for that.  But, hey, The Light That Never Goes Out does make a cameo appearance.  Yep, it's still going strong.