Celebrating the first monsoon rain

Luci nibbling my ear

The first monsoon rains are like a celebration. I already wrote about the long and seemingly eternal wait ... the moment the sky bursts open is a great moment of relief and happiness all around.

This year, I was home. It started raining around midday and everyone, including myself, rushed to their balconies to watch the downpour. We live in a community with many apartments so that's a lot of people on their balcony. At this time of the year, people are usually hiding inside with their air-conditioning blasting. But during that special moment, we are all out (well, kind of out).

The rain is usually a moment where I decide to take the dogs out. This is something I started doing almost a decade ago when we lived in Delhi and had this lovely adopted Doberman called Leo. The parks in the area we lived in were not dog friendly (which is a JOKE considering the number of street dogs in there) so when it rained I knew that the usual grumpy people would be at home. I'd take Leo and rush to the park. By then there were numerous puddles, some of them almost a feet deep. I'd let him off leash and he'd run in and out of puddles. He just loved it and my heart warmed at the thought of what this dog had been through, and the thought that he could now enjoy the simple pleasure of getting absolutely filthy in the park.

Not all dogs like the rain though. Our Great Dane Laila does, but it depends how and when (high maintenance). She likes the rain when there is mud and she can get filthy. She's less keen when we're in the condominium and she needs to walk in the puddles on the tar road (if you can't mess up the flat what's the point?).

Nevertheless we did go for a little walk and got soaked. It continued raining for quite a while so I decided to head to the stables, but not without stopping on the way to buy some samosas and milk so that we could have chai.

As expected, the stable area was very muddy but luckily the stables themselves were dry. The dogs ran off into the puddles and we set up a table and chairs in part of the stable to enjoy tea.

We joked that the horses looked like waitresses, but definitely didn't act like them and turned out to be cheeky bystanders nibbling your hear and begging for some tea! (yes, they LOVE chai).

Nothing beats samosa & chai, nothing