rain, rain

On the whole, it is roughly accurate to say: “it never rains in Cairo.”

Obviously, that’s not quite literally true. A colleague told me today that there are on average 5 days per year when it rains here. That sounds about right. And “day of rain” doesn’t mean a day of constant downpour, it means that it drips for awhile– usually 5 minutes, but sometimes as much as 10 or 15 minutes.

The rain is never very hard, either. But today there have been 3 or 4 outbursts of rain, and though the showers are laughable by the standards of anyone who doesn’t live in a desert, their very unusualness makes them shocking. One never has an umbrella nearby, for instance, and as you can imagine it is rather hard to buy them (unlike Amsterdam, where there’s always an umbrella for sale within a few dozen meters of wherever you happen to be).