Tuesday, May 6, 2008

A Rainbow in Bangkok Skies

Lo, the many moons ago when Ann and I were Peace Corps volunteers in a little northern town in Thailand (actually, it was only about thirty, moons that is), I said one day, “you know, with all of the moisture in the air, I’m surprised that we haven’t seen a rainbow in all the time we’ve been here.” I was sure that they’d been sneaking around but we hadn’t seen any.

We saw one within a week, which often happens when someone shoots their mouths off like that. We were in the pool at the lux . . . no, the good hotel near our house and sure enough, we saw a rainbow in a sky of mixed clouds, a rainbow in the form of a circle around the sun. Neither of us had ever seen one like that before, anywhere, or since for that matter. It seemed to hang there forever.

I saw another one the other day, and boy if it wasn’t a unique doozie of a rainbow too. Another sky of mixed clouds, low nimbostratus, and the dark low stratocumulus, along with higher cumulonimbus rain clouds and alto-cumulous clouds, through a hole in the clouds, a hole filled with bright blue sky, there was a lone high altitude cirrus cloud in the form of a parallelogram, cirrus clouds are made of ice crystals, and the whole thing was lit up in a bright rainbow of color.

The sky here is always entertaining.

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