The dry season (aka winter) is ending.
Northwest South Korea is actually the wettest place place I've ever lived, except for those months in Valdivia, Chile. My hometown of Arcata, on the southern edge of the allegedly rainy Pacific Northwest, actually doesn't get as much precipitation as Seoul, but its rainy reputation is reinforced by the vast number of overcast days each year. I blame my Arcata upbringing for my somewhat problematic relationship with sunny days.
Anyway, despite the "on average" wet climate, here, it's all concentrated into the summer monsoon. So winter is dry. Drier than a midwestern winter, although bitterly cold just like Minnesota. But with spring, and warming temperatures, the moisture begins to come. Rainy days. And of course, since it's spring, everything turns stunningly green.
Some of my most vivid memories of "greenness" are from the spring of 1991, when I was assigned to a special "customs detail" outside of my assigned US Army support battalion, here in Korea. I was a "liaison" attached to a group of Korean truck-drivers / movers, basically. The movers were employed by the US Army to come in and move US soldiers from base to base, or to pack them up for their return to the US, etc.
Because there was a Korean government customs official involved, the US Army liked to send along a "throwaway" liaison to kind keep an eye on things, I guess. That was me — because my sergeant didn't like me, he gave me what everyone supposed was an onerous extra assignment. But I loved it. I spent a good portion of that spring riding around in a Hyundai 2-ton truck with a team of about 4 Korean blue-collar types who had very poor English, as we went from base to base, and from off-base apartment to off-base apartment, packing up and loading up US soldiers' worldly goods and transporting them around.
I remember riding in the back of the truck, watching the rain beyond the canopy, as the green countryside whirled past. Stopping in some hole-in-the-wall restaurant and having chili-ramen with cheese-whiz (some kind of weird lower-class Korean delicacy). Picking up a few bits of Korean. Standing aside in the barracks at Camp Boniface (the forwardmost post of the US Army in Korea, facing the North Korean border), looking uselessly officious, while the Korean customs official went down his checklist of "forbidden items," and the impatient infantryman-du-jour looked on. And then returning to my unit that evening, only to be told I was still responsible for that broken humvee or deuce-and-a-half truck, and working late into the night in the motorpool shop.
But it was during this "customs detail" in 1991 that I first fell in love with the emerald, rainy Korean countryside of spring and early summer. I flash back on these memories, stepping outside today to walk to work: the sting of a raindrop on my cheek, the flash of suddenly green treebranches lifted by wind.