One of the things that has thrilled me most about being in Adelaide is, surprisingly, the weather. Having spent the previous five months in the endlessly perfect days of the dry season in Queensland and the NT (It rained when I was in Noosa back at the beginning of July, then it rained on two days when I was in Airlie Beach but from July to November, that is the sum total of my rainy experiences), the mere sight of wet stuff falling out of the sky has me well excited!

It appeals to my Englishness. Admittedly I am one that loves the rain back home; Autumn is hands-down my favourite season, I adore stormy weather and I like nothing better than to be inside looking out when the rain is pouring and the wind is raging and there are little bits of fallen leaves stuck and salty water stuck all over my bay window. It makes me feel cosy and warm and safe. Even going out in the rain doesn't really bother me because I know the feeling when I get back inside afterwards, of shedding soaked garments and putting on warm dry socks and getting all comfortable again is more than worth the effot. But even the typical rain-bemoaning Brit would, I suspect, after five months dry feel some degree of yearning for the waterworks.. it is in our blood to be rained on!

I planned my trip, very roughly, so that I would spend the winter/dry season, when it is cold and 'orrible down south and hot and dry up north in the northern states then come back down to the bottom bit when it starts to get rainy up north and a bit warmer down here.
Adelaide and the South have much greater day-to-day variability in the weather than the tropics. [Incidentally, my trip to Aussieland has been one BIG geography and biology lesson, I absolutely LOVE experiencing in real life all these things that I have learnt about like constant day length and weather in the tropics compared to more variability in the sub-tropics]. Since I have been in Ade, we have had days of 43C with hot hot wind, humid days, dry and hot days, a good few cloudlessly-blue-skied days but also some chillers (I had to buy furry boots!) and of course, several rains. I like the variability, it is interesting! Months and months of perfectly sunny and dry days IS nice, but it's not interesting; here I wake up and have to look out of the window before I decide what to wear.

One thing I noticed in QLD was how hopeless the weather forecasts were, they would always say 'sunny' for everywhere, with 'patchy cloud' or a 'chance of rain' along with a temperature prediction, all of which seemed to have been plucked at random from a hat and rarely corresponded to what was actually happening.
Down here though, they are a lot better! The temperature prediction is often in the right ballpark and when they say 'rain', it usually does at some point. I have come to the conclusion that this is due to the weather forecasters' job in the sub-tropics being much more interesting. Up north, it must get tedious: 'clear, sunny and warm' every day for every location. So they start to throw in a few 'patchy cloud's and 'chance of rain's, just to make things more interesting. It doesn't really matter if they happen of not, 'chance of rain' being a condition very hard to verify, as are patchy clouds, well, if they're really patchy you could easily miss seeing them altogether so who knows if they actually happened or not.

But the main point of this post was the rain... It's just COOL when it rains here. The droplets are quite big, what I've seen so far has been proper-job rain, not some horrible misty, half-hearted, fine drizzle but the real get-you-wet stuff and I love it! It still gives me an excited feeling when the sky darkens and the heavens open. An ingrained Englishness of mine has the assumption that because it's raining it will be cold. It looks like England from inside, particularly after dark, when the streets are black and slick and everyone has their brollies up and the cars and buses are WHOOSHING past through the puddles, with slanting raindrops illuminated in their headlights It LOOKS like it should be cold from inside, and with the aircon on it's easy to feel a bit cold, but then I go out in it and am surprised every time to be warm enough in shorts and a T-shirt.

The Adelaidians, who have been here all winter and had more than enough of the cold and rain, think I'm mad. But the rain thrills me right to my Pommie core, and I love it!