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Vietnamese Hospitality…
Posted on August 25th, 2009 2 commentsToday, I got caught in a terrible rainstorm. I’ve been lucky so far in that I’ve only been caught in mild rain (relatively speaking). Today’s storm was bad. Lots of people flooded out their bike engines. Water was over the foot pegs on my bike. Even with a poncho on, I got completely soaked thanks to cars that didn’t bother slowing down. Waves of water would assault me from the side, often shooting up under my poncho. I was as wet as I could be, and it wasn’t pleasant.
On the way home, I had to stop at the Sufat dealer where I’d purchased my bike. There was some paperwork to finalize. The manager took one look at me and immediately dragged me to the back room, where he made me take off my soaking wet shirt and gave me one of his own to wear. He then made me hot tea and sat me down so I could warm up. We finished the paperwork issues (still have to go back one more time–the Vietnamese do love their paperwork) and I went on my way in a clean, dry shirt. 10 minutes later I was at home.
The rain finally slowed down. Our neighborhood was not as hard hit as the center of the city, where I started out. Still, it was a hard rain. As wet as I got, I still had fun.
2 responses to “Vietnamese Hospitality…”
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What was the temperature of the water? and the air?
I’m surprised that people will drive scooters in such weather. You’d think that the rate of accidents and such would go up quite a ways during times of, well, flood.
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The temp was 31c, but dropped to 28c just before the rain hit (you could also *feel* a pressure drop…). Although the water was warm, it wasn’t warm enough. Unless the water is at or above body temp, wet clothes will rob core heat and could lead to hypothermia–even in the tropics. That’s why the dry shirt was so welcome.
Accidents do go up during rain. Bikes get swamped out by cars. Scooter drivers get blinded by sheets of water from passing cars. Cars hydroplane. Bikes going through puddles too fast hit unknown, submerged obstacles. When the rain is really bad, I head for a cafe.
As an aside, in two days we received more than San Diego’s typical annual rainfall–9.9 inches.
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standardtoaster August 27th, 2009 at 08:10