A Little Rain

Well, to be fair, it was more than a little rain. It was a downpour. I was on the bus, coming home from school. Lightning hit a few times within fifty yards of the bus, with a nice crack! and flash! My walk from the bus stop to home was a blustery, drenching stroll that shredded my admittedly already tired little umbrella. Upon arriving home, I discovered, to no surprise at all, that the electricity was out.

I rent a condo in a very up-scale complex named Lumpini Ville, one of many Lumpini Property Management developments around Bangkok. And yet, whenever it rains more than a little, or the rain has some wind behind it, the electricity goes out. As I write, the rain has been over for three hours, and yet the electricity is still out, that’s four hours of no lights, no nothing. The rest of the neighborhood has long been cheerfully back in business. What’s wrong with this picture?

Face it, people, it rains in Thailand, every year, a lot, it shouldn’t be such a surprise. If it were snowing I could understand. If this were America, the condo owners would be all the way up in arms, they’d sue the people that sold them the condos in the first place.

But here, and this is the blessing and the curse of Thailand, it’s just another opportunity to smile. Wow! That was some rain! Where’s the candles?

Even a little bit of rain is enough to make the cable TV go out. That’s expensive too, more than fifty dollars a month for the no-holds-barred Platinum Package, that’s a fortune over here, you can rent a nice place for that in most of Thailand. Same with the Wi-Fi for the computer, rain? forget it. And the rainy season is long, featuring rain pretty much every day.

But forgiveness and acceptance is the rule over here, so lets just all smile and get over it! That’s a good lesson for me, but hard.