Not so long ago, we posted about how the weather had changed.  For the past month or so, it has been really hot here, and it has poured in the mid-to-late afternoon for about 20 minutes.  The heat was worse than anything we had felt in Indonesia…just brutally hot in the sun.  It was hotter in Sabah, but that was abnormal; here, the heat was really something.  The rains were also crazy.  These were big old thunderstorms that whipped down all of the palm fronds around our neighborhood and started small floods at the bottom of the hill near our apartment complex.  The sky would be completely lit up with lightning for about half an hour as well.

Well at any rate, in the past couple of days, it’s like someone has flipped a switch.  Not only has it been much cooler, but it hasn’t rained since Saturday.  It is so comfortable here now that I (TP) have been wearing jeans around the house with no problem, except for when I’m cooking.  Moreover, when we go out for our swim at 7:00 AM, right as the sun is rising, we are downright chilly.  It’s bizarre.  Needless to say, getting in the water makes us even colder, as the pool has been much cooler.  Another fun benefit is that the cats in our neighborhood have been out more often during the day, since they don’t have to avoid the hot sun so much.

We hope it stays like this for awhile…almost certainly this is the end of the intermonsoonal period and the beginning of the summer monsoon that used to take traders back to India and China (and the Hadramawt in Yemen and even back to Portugal).  Just think, 500 years ago right now, people in Malaya were finishing up their month of trading and were getting back on their ships.