Monkey's wedding
posted by Kerry-Anne
Good thing I brought my laundry in when I did... who would've expected rain this afternoon? The sun was shining beautifully in through the lounge windows, when suddenly I heard rain beating down on the roof at the back of the house. I rushed to grab my camera and managed to get a few shots of this monkey's wedding before it was all over.There's something very magical about the rain falling while the sun's shining, and I suppose that's why this phenomenon has been given all sorts of folkloric names in many cultures. What is it called in your country?
14 Comments:
Sorry nothing mystical or romantic - we call them sunshowers!!!
Very interested to read you hang your washing outside like we do in Australia. There is nothing nicer than the smell of fresh air and the sun on your clean dry clothes!!!
Up here though in PNG everything is hung under the house as the sun is too hot and fades everything.
"Monkey's wedding"? A funny name! In Brittany (i don't know about France...), we're used to say "C'est le diable qui fait des crêpes" (=the devil is cooking pancakes)because this sunshowers usually come in February and we eat "crêpes" on Shrove Tuesday (even if i am not a religious person). Don't you find mine funny too?
What I find fascinating is how there is some wedding connotation in so many parts of the world (be it jackal, rat, or monkey). I wonder why it is associated with a wedding/marriage?
Jules, I think "sunshowers" is a very pretty word - I'd never heard it until I did my research last night and found the term on wikipedia.
Alice, now I have a craving for crepes. With Nutella. :) We had pancakes on Saturday, but they just don't compare to crepes. Our standard pancakes are really just flour, milk and egg. We've made proper crepes a few times since coming back from Brittany (in fact, we had some on Shrove Tuesday too, just for the fun of it!), and they're SOOOO much better than pancakes. My next challenge is to make galettes, but I believe that's a whole lot more difficult because the buckwheat flour makes the batter very sticky.
Duncan, I know - I found that weird too. And nobody else seems to have any idea why either. Must date back to the days of Pangaea...
It is amazing to me how different people have different names for the same events. I never heard a monkeys wedding or sunshowers before. As far as I know we have always said, "It's raining."
My mother used to hang the wash outside on metal clothes line wire to dry. And then when it was dry she brought it into the house and folded it. If something had to be ironed, she sprinkled those pieces with water and rolled them up and set them aside to iron with a hot iron the following day.
Monday was "wash day" and Tuesday was "ironing day."
Today—
Their beaks close, their eyes shut and their heads flop over the edge of the nest.
American Robin series starts today.
abraham - yes my Mum did exactly the same thing with the clothes. She had a plastic bottle with holes in the top and then folded the clothes up in a big roll of plastic. My grandmother actually boiled her clothes in a copper on the fire when I was a child until she got a washing machine!!! Saturday was my Mum's wash day and Sunday ironing - I guess because she worked!!!.
In Russia we call it "the mushroom rain", as, mushrooms being a large part of Russian culture and cuisine, supposedly mushrooms grow especially well during such rain :)
As to why it's associated with marriage, I've heard that some people say "the monkey is marrying the moon" suggesting the union of two very different things (sun and rain). Why the moon? I don't know unless its just alliteration and a funny concept.
You lot are nuts. No really, nuts.
In Dutch we call it 'kermis in de hel', i.e. fair / carnival in hell.
Indeed another example of uniting opposites.
I'd like to hear how it is called in Afrikaans.
In Afrikaans it is called Jakkalstrou (Jackal's wedding).
Ah, thanks Ted, you're a star.
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