Thunder, Lightning and Muffins

Pictures: Outside my teaching building, The main street, Next day – A split tree, A lucky car

Yesterday, around 4pm, I was teaching my class on Shakespeare's sonnets when the sky clouded over and turned black as night, the wind picked up and and the rain began to bucket down. My students stopped pretending to pay attention to my scintillating analysis of sonnet 146 and kept saying instead "下雨了" ("It's raining!"). Well, I have to admit, it was raining very hard. We paused to peer out the window.

We could barely see outside as the water was falling so fast and thick.The trees were a blur of movement. The thunder was really loud and close, followed swiftly by bright cracks of lightning. One girl suddenly remembered, "I forgot to shut my window!" Her roommates looked distinctly unimpressed. I said she could go now and shut her window if she liked. No one wanted to leave the room. They weren't afraid of the rain, but they wanted to make sure I was ok. All this fuss for a little rain?

I finished class and called my friend to say I would be a few minutes late as my class finished late. I got downstairs and stopped. The road outside my teaching building had turned into a river. Students were wading knee deep across this raging torrent to get to the other buildings. I called my friend and cancelled. I was not wading to the subway station in my brand new shoes. Besides, the subway was probably flooding as well!

My bus, due to take me back to the other campus, failed to show up at 6, or 6.10 or 6.15. So, instead I spent a delightful evening on campus with a friend of mine, sharing spaghetti and practicing my Chinese with some of her colleagues. We baked muffins, discussed the popularity of Mickey Mouse, and compared the weather in Beijing and Shandong province.

We were very lucky, I don't think any buildings were very badly damaged. The car above had no broken windows, and I know of no one who was hurt. Even my new shoes were relatively unscathed by their underwater adventure.

I spoke with the sister of my Chinese teacher and on her street, a manhole cover washed away in the flood. Two pedestrians wading through the water fell through the hole left behind and they have not been seen or heard from since.

The man upstairs is all powerful. Anything can happen. Lest we forget!