[if it keeps on rainin' // levee's goin' to break]

It's summer in Korea, which means it's hot and wet and probably raining. All Koreans will proudly tell you that Korea has four distinct seasons, which is true. What they don't mention is 장마, the East Asian monsoon that inundates Korea with rain from late June to early August. This week was especially wet, with major rain storms Sunday, Tuesday and Friday.


On Tuesday, after eight solid hours of torrential rain, the storm drains and gutters near my school couldn't no longer handle the water and the path behind my school, which leads from the middle and high schools to the major apartment complex in town, flooded. When I needed a break from lesson planning, I hung out my office window and watched the middle school students shriek as they realized they would have to wade through calf deep water to get home.

The rain was hard enough that my school has some minor flooding. We don't have an an air conditioner at my school, so we rely on opening windows to make being inside bearable. Usually this works pretty well: all the classrooms have sixteen large windows (half of one wall) and the hallway is lined with windows. If all the windows are open and you leave the doors open, you can get a nice cross breeze. Add the six 선풍기 (electric fans mounted on the ceiling) in the classrooms and it isn't too bad. This means that on Tuesday, despite the heavy rain, all the windows in the school were open. Tuesday afternoon the rain started blowing sideways, right through the open windows and into the hallway on the top floor. By the time we realized what had happened, there was an a quarter inch of water in the halls and we got to bail out the hallway with dustpans.