The Rain In Sp..Oh Burgenland!

When it rains, it pours.

These few rainy days we are having right now, must be part of the 65 days per year with no sunshine. Our part of paradise does have on average about 300 days of sunshine per year. The streets might be paved with piles of pristine white snow, but the sun will still be shining. Yes, that still counts.

Rain to me is a good thing. When you have lived on the African continent, you learn to appreciate water or rather the lack of it. Water restrictions are not fun at all. Lack of water is horrid for farming too and costly as they somehow need to get water onto the crops. A rainy day saves the farmers oodles of irrigation money. So, rain is fabulous.

The skies opened up on Sunday night in spectacular fashion and yesterday morning as we were driving past Burg, we saw how much it had actually rained. Sadly, some parts were flooded again. Ironically just outside the swimming lake. Building on flood planes seems to be done all over and in time people will learn to respect nature a tad bit more.

Living in Austria or rather Burgenland with its long history, it is amazing to see how absolutely brilliant most people were back in the middle ages. Almost all the old villages were built on a hill. Water or foes were kept at bay. Clever. In fact, modern man could learn a thing or two from the town planing of the olden days.

When the rain pelted us on Sunday evening, I remembered that I needed to close windows at a friends place. About a 5 km round trip so I had to take the car. Bob heroically offered to drive me. Great. He had his favourite leisure pants ( those with holes and stretchy elastic ) on and didn't see the point of changing as he did not plan to get out the car at all. Fair enough, I was wearing our only working ( don't we all have those useless non-working ones in our cupboards? ) raincoat in any case.

One of Bob's favourite Buschenschanks is right next door to where we had to go and it was open. I couldn't resist teasing him:

" Bob, come let's go and have supper there. "

" Yes..oh no, I can't go like this! "...

Bob obviously didn't listen to the parental advice: Never wear your old holey leisure pants outside the house...!

Biggi

Taken while driving. This is just one day of rain with more having fallen over night.

At the bottom of Burg.

The sky over our home did look rather ominous. Nature in its many guises.