a walk in the rain

I had myself a nice, rainy, Saturday-night walk that went past midnight and bled into Sunday. 247 minutes and probably around 18 kilometers. The walk took me along the Tan Creek to the Han River; I turned left at the confluence and walked a few minutes westward just to get myself some distance, then turned around and headed east, following the river to my usual U-turn point at the Jamshil Bridge. I ended up soaking wet, as usual, which always makes me wonder why I even bother wearing rain gear.

I hit the Jamshil Bridge a bit before 11 p.m., which gave me time to take the following two under-the-bridge shots right before the lights went out for the night:

So there's a Han River festival that starts up in a few days. I wonder what that's going to mean.

The streams of water pouring off the bridge were fascinating. While the night was fairly cool (around 23ºC or 73ºF), the rain fell pretty steadily because we're not through the jangma/monsoon season quite yet. This is a summer rain, though, so despite being soaked, I didn't mind too much. It's cold rains that demoralize me.

Here's that other Jamshil Bridge shot:

Korea has some impressively hypertrophic earthworms. During the spring and summer, these monsters come out whenever there's a rain. They normally love rooting around in soil, but when rainwater floods their usual habitat, they're driven to the surface because they're not water-breathers. As a result, you'll see these foot-long monstrosities trying to cross streets and bike paths as they blindly Slinky their way from somewhere to somewhere, accordioning along like the weird little beasts they are. And God help you if you ever try to pick one of them up. They flail around powerfully and desperately like kidnapping victims, fighting to get loose.

I was hesitant to bring my phone out that often because it was raining, but I saw this beautiful example of an American-style orb-weaver, and I knew I had to try to get a shot of it. It was sitting heavily in its neatly geometric web, and luckily, it had parked itself under a nearby lamp. (What do you call a lamp alongside a bike path? You can't say "street lamp," so what do you say?) This sucker was huge—the biggest such orb-weaver I've seen on any of my walks across Korea. In the arachnid world, sexual dimorphism is reversed from how it normally is with mammals: for spiders, the female is the giant, and the male is a relative midget. This was definitely a big honkin' female. Take a look:

I actually tried flicking the spider—something I've done with Korean orb-weavers in the past, occasionally with disastrous, gut-splattering results (Korean orb-weavers are surprisingly delicate: they pop easily, as I discovered). This thing was so tough that all it did was reverse its position on the web: its body went from what you see in the camera shot above to facing me with the bottom of its cephalothorax and abdomen, showing me its underside. Come to think of it, I should have gotten a shot of the flipped spider, but I didn't think to do that. Damn. It really was impressive, though.

I saw the spider right as I was embarking on the final kilometer of my walk. Maybe I should go back out there Sunday afternoon and see if it's still there. Orb-weavers tend to stay wherever they're stationed, so there's a good chance I could find the spider again. But the forecast is for continued rain all day Sunday, so I might have to wait until later.

Ooh—what if I grabbed a huge earthworm and draped it onto the orb-weaver's web? Kind of a cruel thing to do to the worm (trust me, though—I was way crueler in my youth), but it might lead to some interesting arachnid-annelid drama.

Be that as it may, it was a good walk.