Our heatwave was finally broken yesterday by some of the heaviest rain I've ever seen, it was literally just walls of water falling from the sky. We had the misfortune to be out and about in Bangsar with no tools for combating the weather, so we bravely or foolishly - depending upon how you look at it - made a break for it. We only wanted to get across the street, but we were instantly drenched and the water in the street came up over my ankles (it had probably only been raining for 10 minutes at this point). We then thought we'd sit it out, but the sky had taken on that rather permanent look of rain and we seemed doomed to wasting our Sunday afternoon milling around the mall soaking wet and freezing so we broke down and took a taxi the three blocks back to the car. It was perhaps the best $1 I've ever spent.
On the upside, the rain really does seem to have broken the heat a bit, it's 7:55 am and I suspect we haven't even hit 90 degrees yet. It has been hot, ferociously hot, hot enough to even make the locals complain.
It's also been horribly hazy and smoggy. A lot of people (mostly Europeans) here complain about the smog. Typically I don't find it to be that bad - excellent by Southeast Asian standards and frankly far better than London and Los Angeles, let's not even go there. In any event, the smog and haze has been particularly bad and I assumed it just had something to do with the heat. Apparently, according to both the news and locals it's that the winds have shifted and it's all the smoke blowing across the Straits of Malacca from all the rainforest that the Indonesians are burning down (for oil palm plantations) on Sumatera. This of course provides the perfect excuse for the Malaysians to remind everyone that really it's the Indonesian's fault (everything is) and how Malaysia's environmental policies really aren't so bad after all . . . .
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