Two Hydrogens, One Oxygen

There’s an old saying for Morton salt, (maybe they still have it): “When it rains, it pours.” There’s even a pretty picture of a girl with a yellow umbrella on the container. I can picture it perfectly in my mind, because we bought a lot of Morton salt when I was younger.

Yesterday, I altered that saying to make it my own: “When it pours, it POURS.”

As I’m in my third week here in Costa Rica, let me impart this knowledge to you: Costa Rica has two seasons: winter and summer. In the summer, there’s moderate weather with little rain. That’s during our spring time. Then there’s the ‘winter.’ That’s what’s going on right now. In the winter, temperatures are in the low to mid 70s, and the forecast is quite predictable: Sunny in the morning, rain likely in the afternoon. A ten-day forecast could look like that for every single day.

So, here people know how to deal with the rain. Some days it doesn’t rain. Sometimes it only rains in certain areas or barrios of San José. For example, one day it rained at home while I was gone and I managed to avoid rain completely. Then there are days like yesterday. The rain started when we arrived from language school into San José. From this bus stop, I have to walk about 9 blocks to my next bus stop to get home. These are 9 city blocks, not blocks like in Sioux Center.

So, as we walked the wind picked up, it rained tremendously and my umbrella even inverted. We’ve learned quickly that you need a sturdy umbrella to survive in Costa Rica. I already had to invest in a better one than the umbrella I’d brought. So, two blocks down, a group of us stopped under a building’s overhang to wait for the rain to let up. We didn’t wait for it to pass, because we knew it wouldn’t actually stop. But, about ten minutes later, it let up enough to be deemed slow enough to walk in.

Let me tell you, there were rivers in the streets. It’s not like the streets were flooded, but in Costa Rica, the distance from the street to the sidewalk can sometimes be large, and sometimes there can be a bit of a gap…which means rivers. By the time I got home, my socks and shoes were so soaked that they were squishing around and I felt the water in them. My pants were wet from the bottom to somewhere above my knee. The sleeves on my shirt were soaked. The rest of me was dry only due to the help of an umbrella.

The lesson that I’ve learned? Umbrellas actually are useful! At home, I don’t use an umbrella. If it rains, I’ll run through it. Here, if it rains, you can’t just run through it. There’s too far to go. And the other lesson? No matter how sunny, how beautiful, or how warm you are in the morning, always remember two things: your umbrella and a sweater or rain jacket of some kind. You won’t regret it.