After 6 months without even a hint of rain, fall showed up in mid May. They say it always arrives in May, but being from the Northern Hemisphere, this still seems ridiculous. Nevertheless, fall arrived drizzling, then dumping cold wet rain. For six days, there was a genuine attempt to right the summer’s deficiency of rain. The muddy smelly Mapocho running down from the Andes grew turgid and menacing, while the streets, clearly ill-equipped for the deluge, flooded. Similar weather ineptitude was mirrored in the south where rivers swelled, flooded, and blocked the Pan-American Highway, canceling all buses headed south. Commuters rushed about miserable and hunched against the cold and rain. The warm mouths of the Metro stations filled with the hawkers’ machine gun rapid cries of ‘paragua,piragua,paragua’ (the sensible name for umbrellas: para = ‘stop’
... read more