“Here comes the sun, little darling…”

I hum the title song to myself a lot in my town, but I always change the word “sun” to “rain.” And luckily, despite all the horrible things I’d heard about Costa Rican rainy season- like the rain washes away parts of the road or the buses don’t run for part of the year because of the mud- at least in my town I really can “say it’s alright.” Sometimes it’s even better than alright, because as any Costa Rican will tell you it is sooooo rico (yummy!) to sleep when it’s raining. The rain is often so heavy that you don’t want to go outside and you can’t hear anything inside, so you don’t fee guilty about curling up in bed with a book or a mug of tea and then drifting off. Or sometimes you’ll wake up in the middle of the night to hear it and it’s such a great feeling to know you can roll over and sleep for another 6 hours. (By the way, I usually get about 10 hours of sleep a night, which is more than I’ve gotten since infancy, if ever) Also, my site is incredibly hot, but when it starts to rain I actually get cold- goosebumps and everything!! So it’s nice to have a bit of a cool down in the day before I go back to melting.

I know this sounds strange, but the way it rains here is so different from how it rains back home. When it starts, you can almost always hear or see it coming before it’s actually on you. That’s never happened to me in Virginia- it’s just dry one minute with dark clouds, and then it’s raining. But here, you can hear the rush of the rain or see this huge curtain of it heading towards you, and you have time to run. If we’re at home, as soon as we hear the first drops we race outside to bring in the laundry from the line- but it’s always a gamble because sometimes the water will fall lightly for just a couple of minutes, and other times it will pour for half an hour and the sound of it pounding the tin roof is deafening. As you might imagine, that makes it really hard for our clothes to dry and some of the clothes I don’t wear as much are actually starting to mold!! The other annoying thing is that if you’re wearing flip flops and walking through town, they will kick up the mud and you’ll get to your destination with flecks of mud completely covering the back of your legs.

Rainy season is from around July to December in Costa Rica, but depending on where you are it can last even longer, or hardly rain at all. In my town it is now raining almost every day, but usually once in the morning and once in the afternoon- so you can still live your life pretty normally. But to show you the difference throughout the country, one time some of my Peace Corps friends and I went to the beach and a few drops of rain began to fall. Immediately all of the volunteers living in the northern part of the country began to pack up their things and run from the downpour that we were sure was going to hit any second. But the volunteers from Guanacaste, in the north west hot beachy part of the country, just laid back in the sand and blinked up at us lazily. They knew that it would only sprinkle lightly for a few minutes before stopping. All of us from the north sat back down sheepishly and tried not to feel too jealous that it’d only rained a handful of times in Guanacaste while all of our clothes have been moldy for the past month and never seem to completely dry.