Giggles in the rain

Well, this has been an eventful two days. The day before yesterday, the rain began to pour. The streets flooded, the animals took cover, and the little naked children started running through the streets. But, apparently, Nichada (the town-type thing that the school is in. All of the kids live there. Seriously) got the worst of it. It all began yesterday morning when I woke up at 9:30. Now, I don't know about you, but that sent some warning bells off for me. I usually wake up at 4:45 for seminary. I was planning to sleep in. Sister Phelps had called the night before and told me she was canceling seminary because her power was out. But that didn't mean 9:30! I wandered out of my room and down to the computer room, thoroughly confused. When I got there I looked up the ISB website. Apparently, there had been a pretty serious storm and school had been canceled. They had no lights and the main library and theatre had taken some pretty extreme damage. Which was just great since the current show I'm doing backstage work for, Animal Farm, opened today. Yeah...

So, no school. Heck yes!

From speaking to my friends, apparently Nichada's been struggling with power. Not, like, a power struggle. Like, electricity kind of power. You know? Anyway, parts of Nichada were without power for twenty four hours!

Like I said, Animal Farm opened today. When I arrived at school, there was still no power in the theatre. But it all turned out okay. After the show, Colin and I, after an insane struggle of "No, let's do something" "Nah, lets not" "Let's go to Sierra's!" "Let's go to Ben's!" etc., got sick of the confusion and just went to my house. After playing some video games and failing at some sewing, we realized that it was raining once again. It was about this time that Colin, Brian, Lindsay and I decided to go to IT Square! Yeah, good idea! Let's go driving in Bangkok at night in the rain! Well, you can only begin to guess where this led.

We eventually made it to IT Square (it's a mall, by the way) but everything was pretty much closed. So, at this point we figured we'd go to Tesco Lotus and take Colin home. When we got out of the mall, we turned right. How the heck we ended up on a completely different road while driving straight, I'll never know. At any rate, we got lost. Hopelessly lost. We fought and fought with the GPS system, but it was raining too hard. After half an hour of wandering, the GPS finally found the signal! There was much rejoicing. It decided to take us straight to ISB. So, we skipped Tesco and started following the directions. More wandering and struggles. We had a general direction, but it wasn't perfect. And we couldn't see a thing through the rain. After a while, two girls just suddenly materialized in front of us! Brian slammed on the breaks and the next thing we heard was, whump!

Yes, someone ran into us. We pulled over and got out of the car and into the rain. A Thai lady was there who had been riding on a motorcycle before the collision. Colin and I looked at each other in the back seat with a rather "what the weird" feeling. There seemed to be no chance at communication. She spoke no English and we spoke no Thai. There was also a nice dent in the back. We had no phone. Mine had died. Lindsay and Colin and I got out of the car and wandered in the rain, looking for a phone. Finally, we found this random girl who had been talking on her phone. We did kind of a hand signal for 'phone' and she let us borrow it. As we waited for the lady to talk to dad, we ended up waiting in the rain. I was soaked by the end.

Finally we piled back in the car and continued on our way. We were pretty tired at this point. Looking carefully, very very carefully, down the road, we began to turn. Only to end up face to face with another car. We had looked the wrong way. They drive on different sides of the road in America and Thailand...

So, after several near-death experiences, we finally found ourselves at home. And through it all I couldn't keep back my smile and my giggles.

I love the rain.