Summer is ending for everyone in the US. Technically, it’s the end of summer here too, even though most of Ecuador is south of the equator. Actually, that means that the rainy season is upon us. Since Ecuador is on the equator, it doesn’t really have seasonal variation except in rainfall. It was kind of funny for me because people here tell me “we have all the seasons in one day”, even though they don’t have seasons, at least not the way we do in the northern US. The two seasons here are really rainy and dry. For a bit more than the first month that I was here, it didn’t rain at all. It was sunny pretty much every single day, and even having clouds was pretty rare.
About two days ago, I looked up at the sky and realized it looked really dark. About ten minutes later, we got the first rain of the season. I checked the forecast for the following week and this is what I saw:
As you can see – we’re now looking at rain every single day. Usually the rain comes at about 3pm in the form of a thunderstorm, and it’ll last a couple of hours.
The change of seasons is a really odd experience because in the US season changes are usually a pretty gradual thing. Winter lasts for a long time into spring and the weather (usually) doesn’t go from consistently 20 to consistently 80 degrees in a couple of days. Here, though, it started raining one day and then just kept raining every day after, which was a bit crazy.
Thankfully, the rain means that the dust that’s been pretty prevalent in the city, during the dry season, will settle down. It also means that I’ll definitely need to start bringing my umbrella with me everywhere.