Rain

It has been raining steadily for the past two days. In most of the places I have lived this would not be much cause for concern. The rain, for the most part, hasn't been too heavy and it has even paused at times. Yet this great sprawling desert city was not engineered for handling even a good shower, let alone two days of precipitation. If even the afternoon thunderstorm that I wrote of last time was enough to make my walk into more of an obstacle course adventure imagine what two days of rain could do!

Yesterday it began sprinkling late morning and by noon was a full-on downpour. A ten-minute walk/run/scramble to the central post-office left K and I soaked, even with an umbrella shared between us. The trickiest thing was not so much what was coming down from the sky as what had already fallen. Ulaanbaatar has no storm drains that I can tell and no culverts designed for handling runoff. Therefore, all the rain that falls in the city runs downhill until it either is absorbed or reaches the river. This means that the roads essentially turn into giant culverts. Any depression in the sidewalk or street (of which there are many) fills with water, creating ever larger and more impassable puddles.

Somehow despite the inconvenience of trying to navigate flooded and/or muddy sidewalks and roads (or maybe because of it), strangers have seemed generally more friendly these past couple days, more often making eye contact and being more forgiving of my broken Mongolian. Perhaps the shared struggle to make it home with dry feet breaks down some barriers that we (both myself and Ulaanbaatarites) have put up because of my foreignness. 

This evening I was nearly home when I reached the construction site that I have to cross every day to get from our apartment complex to the main road. As is the nature of a construction site the ground is dirt and filled with holes, making for an interesting crossing after two days of rain. Some thoughtful construction workers had placed bricks and other large stones in the middle of the largest puddles to create ways of safe passage. I had just reached the edge of one of the small lakes and was looking around to find the best navigation route. Just as I spotted the single crossing stone in the center of the water I also noticed a young woman about my age surveying the puddle from the other side. We caught each others' eye and laughed at our predicament before she motioned to me to cross.