Thunder and Rain!

We’ve actually had a thunderstorm here!  That is majorly exciting.  I thought Bahrain never had storms, ever.  I am in my second year here on this island, and this is the first storm we’ve had.  Sure we have dust storms, but here I’m specifically speaking of storms with some kind of water falling out of the sky.

Last year it rained some.  This year, it’s only rained once before that I know of, unless it’s rained during the night sometimes.  That’s possible, but I don’t get up in the middle of the night to check.  The one time before last night that it rained was the 8th of February and it rained for only an hour, but as I got caught outside in it, I got wet.

Last night I started hearing noises that sounded like thunder.  Since it NEVER thunders here–at least so far it hadn’t–I thought it couldn’t possibly be thunder.  Fireworks, perhaps?  But then when I went to the bedroom for something and happened to be standing quite close to the window, I heard it again.  It was definitely thunder.  So I opened my balcony doors and listened.  The wind was noisy–not unusual–but I thought it sounded like maybe rain too.  It was too dark to tell, though.

The gloomy day along with a view of the fountain that is hardly ever on. When I peeked outside I noticed it and decided to get a picture even though it's not a nice day for photography.

I don’t know if it rained last night (I think it did), but I do know that it rained today!  Today dawned overcast and very gloomy.  Gloomy is unusual here in Bahrain.  We have sunny much more often.  I’d thought I left gloomy back home in Illinois when I last lived there.  But here gloomy was.  And it thundered off and on.  And then around 3:00 p.m. (don’t remember exact time) it started pouring down rain!  I watched it come down.  I couldn’t go out because the wind was blowing it in on our balcony.  In just a couple of minutes we had an inch of water on our balcony.

Almost as quickly as it began the rain stopped.  Since then it’s been gloomy again, although the weather feed I get from the Muharraq airport says it’s “Mostly Cloudy.”  It looks “All Cloudy” to me, so I don’t know what’s going on in Muharraq, but from here it looks the same.  In fact, for most of the day I’ve been barely able to see Muharraq, and if you look at a map, you’ll notice it’s quite close.  (Muharraq is the north-east island that’s “almost touching” the main island.)  That should tell you how poor visibility is.

The mud on my balcony after the rain

Part of the low visibility is due to the dust we have in the air.  Dust is nearly omnipresent and yesterday the sky was hazy with dust.  Sometimes it gets so bad it looks like yellow fog and that combined with wind makes a dust storm.  Even without wind dust still gets everywhere.  Washing your car regularly is a necessity here!  So part of the gloominess of the sky today was due to dust haze.  And when it rained we got rain mixed with dust–which makes mud.