I arrived in Hoi An on a warm, rainy night after a long bus ride from Ha Noi. I thought that it would stop raining but it seemed that I arrived in the middle of the rainy season. This did not deter me a bit. Living in Southern California, I assumed that the rainy season means nothing more than exasperation from TV news station regarding flash flood in the LA river and horrible accidents on the freeway. So I expected it to be similar in Hoi An (even though it is in an entirely different continent, thousands of miles away). I expected bad driving (as if they don’t drive badly enough already), a little flooding from the river.

But I went to sleep, listening to the falling of the rain, only to wake up early in the morning, walking down into the motel’s lobby and saw that the water level rose into the motel’s lobby. Soon everyone gathered at the stairs watching the water rising slowly.