Rain?

On Sunday, it rained. Well, to call it rain might be a bit of an overstatement. Honestly, calling it rain would be like cutting up a lindt truffle into ten parts, eating one, and calling it dessert. It drizzled. And even calling it drizzle feels like an overstatement. Seriously, there was just enough water coming out of the sky to make the ground a little wet and the air smell like rain.

Anyway, at the time, my host mom was watching Spanish soap operas with her sister and cousin (this went on for 3+ hours on Sunday - I'll wait and see if it's a weekly get-together next week - keeping my fingers crossed that it is not). I didn't even notice it was raining, but one of my friends here sent me a skype message that said that it was. We all thought this was a big deal because in Carlisle it never goes an entire week without raining, which it had since we got here.

At that precise moment, my host mother walked into the room and asked me if I wanted a cup of coffee. It seemed a lovely idea, so I went to help with the preparation (she never lets me do any preparation by myself if she's around). I mentioned to her that it was raining. She replied curtly that it was not. I said that I hadn't seen it but that one of my friends had told me it was. Finally, she had the bright idea of actually looking out the window to see whether or not it was raining (William James would have been so proud).

The ensuing scene was something that I honestly could not exaggerate. My host mom shouted from the kitchen into the living room to her sister and cousin that it was raining, and they (both between 50 and 70) bolted out of their positions in an armchair and on the sofa and raced to the window. Seeing two women in their later middle ages run around a tiny apartment to get a glimpse of rain was really something I cannot imagine forgetting.

Finally catching on that this must be an exceptionally unusual event, I asked my host mom something along the lines of, "so the rain's not very common?" This question sent them (my host mom, her sister, and cousin) into a heated debate about whether or not it rained in May. Whether or not it had rained in June, July, or August was, I guess, so obvious, that nobody in her right mind could have thought that it had. The consensus was that it certainly hadn't rained since May, but that it might have rained in May.

Coincidentally, it rained again yesterday... This time, one of the Spanish professors at the Cursos para Extranjeros center warned us that we might not want to go outside because it was storming. The rain was marginally more significant than the day before.