Bring on the Rainstorm!

We've been getting real, true rainstorms this summer. And I don't say that lightly – coming from North America (and having lived in the Midwest for four years), good thunderstorms are one of the things I really miss here. Berlin is heavy on the gray, dreary winter rain, light on the dramatic summer storms.

But THIS summer, this summer, we've already had more thunderstorms, and most of them far more dramatic, than anything I've seen in Germany before. Tonight I was in another part of town – at a swanky art book opening, actually, and then meeting friends for dinner – and when we walked back out of the restaurant, it was bucketing down like you almost never see here.

I biked home, immediately drenched to the skin and singing at the top of my voice, because it was all drowned out by the rain anyway. Then for a while I made funny noises, BRRR at the cold of the rain and WHOOO when lightning split the sky.

I arrived back to the intersection near my house to the sight of two young guys, totally naked and camped out on top of a Litfaß advertising column (visual explanation of that for non-European readers here) with a few bottles of beer, apparently enjoying the rain as well. You can maybe kind of see them in the bottom left of this poor-quality, low-light picture taken from my balcony:

You really gotta love Berlin!