Rain, more rain, and a BBQ

Today Leiden probably got the worst rain showers since I moved here nearly two years ago. I had the good fortune of having to bike through some of them. Although hardly dry, it wasn’t too bad yet in the morning when I went to work. It wasn’t pouring down hard either when I rode home tonight. But in between, that’s where the real fun was.

I had a meeting with the parents from one of our baseball club’s youth teams at six, at the baseball field across town from where I work. It’s only about two miles, but it got me soaked thoroughly. It had been raining throughout most of the afternoon, with the storm really picking up around five. By the time I set out, several streets were flooded, with the water sometimes standing more than four inches high even on the pavement.

I turned into one of those streets and poorly underestimated the length of the submerged stretch. At previous streets, I just pulled up my feet and let my momentum carry me through. In this case, I got nowhere close to reaching dry land, so I did the only thing I could do: bring my feet back onto the pedals and carry on, even though that meant submerging my feet at every turn of the pedals. At least I didn’t have to watch where I went anymore for the rest of the trip.

Of course, it was also rush hour at that time, and the heavy rains were badly affecting traffic. Several cars got stuck when the water disabled their engines. Repair services had a hard time getting to them because of all the traffic jams.

But it wasn’t just cars and people that got wet. A fellow grad student had water at all three levels of his apartment. It was seeping in from the street into the ground-floor hallway, leaking through the roof into his third-floor bedroom, and dripping down from the bedroom into his second-floor living room. I hope nothing important got damaged. I was lucky enough that no water got into my apartment.

After the meeting with the parents, I went back downtown for a barbecue with fellow graduate and undergrad students. The people in charge had set up a party tent to keep the grill and the cooks dry, and the rest of the party took place indoors. That worked very well, and we had a good time.

To give you some idea of what things looked like, here are two pictures I pulled from the Dutch news site nu.nl: