Autumn has come
So far I have only written about what I’ve been doing here. I did not pay a lot of attention yet to things that are different here compared to back home. One big difference that I cannot deny anymore is the weather. From the moment I got here, I have been in a lovely summer: around 20 degrees, sun all over and not a lot of wind. This weather was so good that it was almost getting suspicious: it could not last long. And indeed, around the 21 of September autumn kicked in.
Not in an easy way: some more rain, slowly decreasing temperatures. Oh no. One day it was sunny and 20 degrees, the next it was completely cloudy and raining nonstop. The clouds were actually lower than the, now orange colored, mountains, almost covering the village in fog. Also the temperatures dropped around 10 degrees. For a day that’s okay. Only it did not stop of course, it’s been going on like this for a week now.
Of course the rain did leave its marks. The local streams and waterfalls on the street were still fun, the leakage during our exam right in front of me however was more difficult to appreciate. It was already hard to focus since the rain outside was moving horizontally, giving the soccer players outside a hard time (did I mention already that they have a soccer team here, that plays first division and trains right next to my classroom?). And since all the rain has to go somewhere, the river just outside campus got bigger. A lot bigger.
That is something that I can appreciate a lot of course as a soil, water and atmosphere student. I mean, I know from all the lectures back home that rain events have an impact on river discharge. But you don’t really realize it until you see that all the rocks that were still there a week ago have disappeared and that what used to be a nice, fast running stream has now turned into a wild water river with multiple waterfalls, of which one is showed in the picture.
Maybe it’s the fact that I come from the very wet, but very flat and thus waterfall poor Netherlands, or maybe it’s that I’m studying water, but I spent a lot of time outside in the rain watching the river and I could have done it the whole weekend. Maybe autumn isn’t so bad here after all.