mango rains

The weather's been funny which made me tired - cold hotel meeting rooms, whacking hot outside, but with intermittent rain.

Apparently the rains now are called "mango rains". It's not the rainy season yet, it's just started to rain a bit off and on. Last night was a bed-blaster, we both woke up at 2 am to a deluge of biblical proportions smashing down on our poor tin roof. The winds were also mighty - in the morning there were leaves on the floor that had been blown if from cracks in the walls! The good news about these storms is that yes, indeed, the mangos are sprouting. The mango trees are fabulous - they have these long, thinnish sort of droopy leaves about oh, a foot long, and a few inches wide, that hang from the branches, and then lovely bean-like green mangos hanging from vines. I would never have guessed that mangoes grew this way before coming here. Really, it's like the're christmas ornaments hung from a string on the tree. You look at the trees from the road, and they seem festive and decorative. We are all eroding our guts from the inside out eating green mangos with salt, fish sauce and chilli pepper flakes. Yummy! [Laos-26-February-2001]