Rain, more rain, and then…snails!

playing_in_the_rain2

December is the officially the wettest month in Singapore. In fact, Singapore gets over five times more rain than Edinburgh in December. We can hardly believe this as we fondly reminisce about those dark, gale-force wet winter days back in Scotland…but climate data (for 2000-2012 from www.worldweatheronline.com) says its true!

average_rainfall_edinburgh

So Edinburgh gets 59mm of rainfall in an average December…

average_rainfall_singapore

…and Singapore gets 323.7mm?! We may have more sunshine now – but we certainly didn’t leave the rain behind!

Having said that, although there is often localized flash flooding in parts of Singapore, we thankfully have nothing on the scale of Storm Desmond. And it’s nowhere near as cold and windy.

We are currently in the “northeast monsoon season” and it has been raining huge, thundery showers almost every afternoon – the kind where umbrellas will not help you. But instead of staying indoors, the girls have decided to embrace the rain. The novelty of being able to get completely drenched in mere minutes without being cold has not worn off, so lately there’s been a lot of splishing, splashing and waterplay out on the patio.

playing_in_the_rain1

Miss Chu and Little Miss have made a couple of short videos – the first one is about playing in the rain!

Our second video is about one of the girls favourite post-rain activities…going on a Snail Hunt. After the rain, the snails like to come out and play. Or are probably forced to emerge from the soggy saturated ground. You can spot lots of different snails just around our block! This is the most common kind:

african_snail

We think this is the African Snail.

Their shells do a reasonable job at camouflage but if you look carefully you notice loads of them everywhere. Can you spot how many snails there are in this photo?

snail_shells

We also get a lot of these cute little ones:

luminescent_land_snail

This might be the Luminescent Land Snail – the young ones apparently glow in the dark but perhaps we’ve only seen the adults.

And here’s another kind we’ve seen – looks like a mummy snail with her baby heading out for a leafy snack together!

mum_and_baby_snails

 

We took one of the snails home for a while and had fun watching it and feeding it.

observing_snail

 

hand_foot_mouth_snail

Yep…kind of gross, but really quite fascinating close up!

And here’s our little snail video!

 

 

3 Comments

  1. To Natalie that was a great video I loved it . But I can’t wait to tell you all about the rain it was terrible but today It was not as bad.Is the rain hot? I am missing you lots and lots.?

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