Last night my small group was supposed to meet - we get together every Thursday night. In the afternoon it started raining and it hadn't let up by 6:00, around the time I get ready to leave for Cindy's house where our group meets. Cindy and I chatted and decided that we would cancel group for the night due to two factors...1. very few people would be there and 2. it was raining. Rain?? Rain can cancel an evening's events?? I thought of this briefly and then dismissed it until I saw Cindy's Facebook status update about the cancellation. Others had commented and said, "you're canceling because of rain?!?!" Maybe I should explain so that it doesn't seem like such a cop-out...
Most of us foreigners in Tianjin do not have a car and, to be honest, we're deathly afraid of getting behind the wheel in this city! So...our main forms of transportation are: bike, bus, taxi or Bus 11 (Bus 11 is our own two legs...hahaha...get it? My students love that joke!) Anyways, I digress... When traveling to small group I usually take a taxi since it is a 45 minute bike ride at night. When it is raining in TJ it is nearly impossible to get a taxi, it requires waiting outside in the muddy, polluted rain for an indefinite amount of time. This would have happened going there and back. By the time I would have gotten there, considering it was rush hour AND raining, I certainly would have been late and would have had to turn around an hour later and do the same thing all over again. The other guy who was going to small group would have biked. He would have had to wear this huge poncho that covers even the basket in front of his bike and still, he likely would have been soaked through by the time he got there. Just as he was drying out, he would have had to turn around and go back home, repeating the same dirty, wet cycle.
Also, I should mention that the rain here is not the kind of rain where you want to run outside, barefoot, playing in the clean rain....oh, no, it's quite a different picture here and the word 'clean' should not be used in any sense of a description!
Now, can you blame us for canceling? On account of...RAIN!
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2 comments:
Ewww, sounds messy. =b
Not to mention that Cindy's area of the city tends to completely FLOOD OUT when it rains, leaving people biking or walking through knee to thigh deep nasty water....:) I don't blame you guys for cancelling. But I do miss you!
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