For the last two days or so, Buenos Aires’ physical environment has been exceptionally copacetic. Not that it hasn’t been great to begin with, but recently, the two major things I’d have quoted as drawbacks have also been absent: the hot, sticky heat, and the dog droppings that mark the sidewalk literally every few steps.

The absence is thanks to a weather system that dropped an impressive (though not unseasonable) amount of precipitation on Monday. The temperature has come down from 35C to 22C, and the flooding carried away almost all of canine fecal matter that had made an obstacle course of every walk down the block.

Of course, no travel story I offer comes without a story of mishaps, and in this instance the mishap involved, of course, me getting caught in the rain without an umbrella. I had been at a capoeira class – it was cut short by the rain, as the facility has a leaky roof. The rain was showing no signs of abating, so I set out from the drippy academy, looking for a bus. A fellow capoeirista and I waded through deserted streets knee-deep in water, trading nods of acknowledgement with the occasional fellow soaked straggler and dodging bags of garbage as they drifted past. As we waited at one stop, the lights on the block next to us went out, creating one of several scenes I wish I’d captured in a photo. Fortunately, a photographer more adventurous than I captured the scene in the hood with her camera, so I’ll leave you with a link to her photoset on Flickr.