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| Il plut pendant quatre ans onze mois et deux jours // It rained for four years, eleven months, and two days |
Yesterday, all of the Canary Islands were expecting a rain - nay, a deluge of biblical proportions - to happen today. The weather warning was issued, and everybody was advised to take various measures of self protection. It being 2020, the warning was taken quite seriously. The rain was supposed to fall with the maximum force between nine in the morning and midday.
It is now 1 pm. I haven't seen any rain yet, although I am told it drizzled some early in the morning.
Anyway. The quote in the caption is from One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, and it is the first thing that comes to my mind whenever Big Rain is mentioned.
The illustration is not, of course, related to the Márquez's epic. It refers to one of the episodes of our life on Fuerteventura.
The ground level of the development in which we lived was, and still is, I imagine, about a metre lower than the level of the street behind it. I am not sure what is the reason for that, some of those unfathomable architectural decisions or plain stupidity. Anyway, when there was no rain - which is almost 100% of time of Fuerteventura - it didn't matter. But one day it suddenly did. A Big Rain came our way and it kept raining hard for a few hours, well into the night. The little passages within the development were flooded. The underground parking was flooded. The water level was just a couple of centimeters below the ground floor level of the houses. Our manager, who lived onsite, was running around in her wellies (pictured) trying to figure out what to do. Fortunately, her husband was a trained diver, and he passed in front of our houses with all his diving gear, on his way to fix the pump which was there for just such an occasion, but not working properly. He fixed it, of course, and it all ended relatively well.
