What the hell is wrong with me? I forgot what this thread was all about.
Right, here I go.
Last Thursday, I went to school for afternoon lessons. I live in Singapore, so we've just entered the monsoon season; that translates into lots of heavy rain, very cool weather, things like that.
I live on the east end of Singapore, and my school's on the west end of Singapore, so my trip took an hour and a half. On the east side, the weather was perfectly normal; not too hot or sunny, but no rain either. When the train I was in left the central part of Singapore and headed for the west end, I noticed the sky turning very dark. By the time the train reached my stop, it was raining very hard, much like a running tap.
From the train station, I had to take a bus from the nearby bus-stop to the school itself. At the bus-stop, I have a choice of three bus services to take: 52, 154 and 184. Leave 52 out, because it played no part in this.
Right, so it's down to 154 and 184, and a bus running under service 154 came first. However, I decided to give 154 a miss to wait for 184 (a personal preference). 154 was just about to pull out when 184 came in.
These two services run along similar routes around my school, and they both stop at the same bus-stop after the train station. Given that 154 came and left before 184, you'd think that it should have cleared the first bus-stop after the station, right? It didn't. When 184 reached that bus-stop, I noticed that 154 had stalled at the bus-stop. It just wouldn't move.
The road to my school was filled with huge puddles of water in several places. At one point, a car drove by so fast that made a spectacular gush of water that would have drenched me if I wasn't in an air-conditioned bus. Nevertheless, it was still quite a shock.
Right outside my school, there was a huge jam. When 184 drove by, I saw that the canal running alongside the road had overflown, creating an obscenely large puddle that covered a third of the three-lane road.
When I arrived at my school, it had only rained for about 20 minutes, yet the roads inside the school had already been mostly turned into shallow rivers of water. To get to my classroom, I had to cross three roads. The first road has a zebra crossing, as well as an underpass built to facilitate bad weather. But the underpass was never built to handle this kind of bad weather.
As I walked down the covered walkway towards the underpass entrance and nearby zebra crossing, I saw two guys watching the people who were braving the weather and using the zebra crossing. They started laughing like hyenas at a girl who had lost her slipper to the road-turned-river, and chased after it to the nearest T-junction despite also running the risk of getting all her school materials and whatnot splattered should she lose her footing.
I decided to use the underpass, which was flooded up to the lower calves. Suffice to say that I got my feet and the lower part of my pants wet, for although I was wearing shoes, they weren't waterproof.
I emerged at the other end of the underpass with very wet feet. As I walked past one of the buildings in the school, I saw that it was flooded, and everyone was keeping their distance.
The next road I had to cross has no underpass to it, only a standard road crossing, so I got my feet wet again as I crossed it. Once I got to the other side, I took out my shoes and dumped out about half a cup of water before moving on.
The rest of my trip to the classroom was pretty uneventful. When I got to the classroom, I took off my shoes and socks to let them dry a little. I spent the next four hours barefooted. When class ended, my socks and shoes were still wet, and I went home with wet feet once again.
