Only in Melbourne...

Melbs is probably the only place in the world to have the worst hailstorm at the end of a warm sunny day in summer. Winds of more than 100kmh rendered umbrellas as useful as toothpicks and showcased the difference between the intrepid and the brainless. Stones of more than 2cm tested the resilience of modern architecture, but I think the water did more damage due to leaks and such.

It was quite a surreal experience, rather much like being in a Stephen King movie. As I walked towards the city I noticed that the sky was a curious shade of blue-green, and thought to myself it's not often one gets to see the colour of the sea in the sky. I was plugged into my iPod, but took off my earphones when I heard an extremely loud whooshing sound coming from behind me, and that was when the first of the hailstones came down. Ran for shelter, didn't really get pelted, but that was just the beginning. The sky went totally dark, and every form of precipitate imaginable came raining (literally) down from the clouds. The skies just opened up and vomited everything it had. Visibility was reduced to a few metres, and the wind was a tremendous force to be reckoned with. Strangely, it wasn't as cold as I'd always assumed it'd be during a hailstorm, although the puddles of water were definitely like out of the fridge. And through it all there was an amazingly fragrant evergreen scent because the trees were being smashed.

The air now smells remarkably fresh and crisp, and the roofs of the walk-up complex opposite my window look completely white and clean. The streets are littered with green, interspersed with what white that haven't yet melted, and kind of portrays a landscape reminding one of little English towns. But in the background you can hear sirens of emergency vehicles, and the honks of impatient cars going nowhere and everywhere. It's flooded everywhere: underpasses, traffic junctions, pedestrian walkways.

Whoever that was praying for rain must have been praying really, really, really hard.

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/edit/

Ok, so after the storm, we get a rainbow. What the.... This place is full of extremes.