Some mighty peculiar weather in Seoul today

It’s a typical summer morning. Hot, humid, and clear skies. At about 11am, the clouds start closing in and it looks like rain. I shrug, remembering that the forecast did say rain for today.

About a half hour later, I look out and notice something strange. It’s not just foggy. It’s not just grey skies. It looks like nighttime! And by that, I mean evening. I can’t see any visible clouds; I can’t even tell where the sky starts! It looks as if a grey, wool blanket is covering the entire city. For a split second, I consider possibility of pollution. ‘Couldn’t be, Seoul can’t be that bad,’ I think to myself. But it is quite odd, I won’t dismiss that. Effectively, it’s 11am, but without a doubt, it looks like 7pm.

Within 10 minutes, the greyness has likened to the cusp between evening and nighttime. Then comes the first murmur of thunder. Weak flashes of lighting begin to penetrate the blinds at work just barely. But despite that, there’s no still sign of rain. I figure the storm is just yonder and on its way.

Soon enough, it starts to rain lightly. Then, faster than I can turn around, BOOM!

The rain is pounding, so mighty that it has a roar of its own. I look out the window and all I see is my reflection in the glass. Within seconds, the streets had suddenly become engulfed in darkness—pitch black darkness. And it is but 12pm on a summer day.

I lean closer to the window to peek outside. Within the darkness, car headlights spotlight the legs of people darting across the street. The wind creates thin sheets of rain which race across the ground in bursts. With the bustle of it all, I almost mistake it for a late night scene.

The lightning isn’t just a passing flash. In between pure blackness, it illuminates as far as I can see. The lighting stretches across the wide street, reflecting off the walls, and entering windows on all sides of the intersection. It’s so bright and white that all I can imagine is a giant fluorescent light bulb.

Meanwhile, the thunder bears no resemblance to a typical rumble. It cracks like a loud whip, only to get louder. And louder. It rings so crisp and clear in my ears. Crack, crack! It’s so loud, it could be gunfire from the floor above.

Now, I’ve had thunderstorms before! But the thunder always rumbles in the distance, while the lighting appears in the corner of my eyes. Never has lighting reached so far down as to touch my face. And never has thunder sounded like Zeus snapping his fingers above my head.

So I sit there eagerly, unsure of how to contain myself. I gulp down my lunch whole while my mind races in confused excitement.

‘This so amazing! I’ve never seen anything like this before!
How can this happen?!
I want to be outside now! Not here, stuck at work!
Maybe at home! No, that’s boring—how about a café? While blogging! Yes, that sounds fun!
I want to roll up these blinds! Can I? Will they mind? I want to bask in this magnificence!
Are they not excited too?! It’s so cool!’


So I ask, “This doesn’t happen often, right?”
“No, not at all. The weather this year is so weird.”
“So this is your first time experiencing this too?”
“Uh, yes.”
‘THEN WHY AREN’T YOU EXCITED??!?!?!!’ I scream in my head.


And within an hour, it’s sunny again. Like many thunderstorms before it, it came and went without a trace.

I typically care none for meteorology, but this was so unreal to me! I wish there was someone who could explain to me how such a mighty storm could come to be. How can the sky turn black?! Considering my coworkers had never experienced such a storm before either, I can’t be that naive, right?


Perhaps I'm spoiled, having come from mild-weathered California. Have you experienced a crazy storm like this before? I want to hear more about crazy storms! *_*

Clearly, this post is of a different flavor than my usual! I’ve decided to finally embrace a slight expansion in the scope of my blog. There are many little things that I have wanted to jot down, and for a while I have resisted doing so, thinking that it’d clutter my blog and deviate from my emphasis. But no longer; I’ve decided to finally embrace it!

Because more than anything, I’ve felt that my blog has become too impersonal and constricting towards myself. I don’t plan for this to take away from my normal posts. It just means that I’ll be posting more frequently with everything I would have held back on before, thinking it wasn’t big enough for the blog. Big or small, I want to remember all!

So if you are here for a specific type of post, you can simply be selective in the posts you read!