However, there are two situations in which riding on a scooter is no fun at all: when it is raining and when the scooter is broken. Puerto Rican rain is characteristically very extreme - the roads go from completely dry to flooded within a few minutes. Needless to say, scooters don't do much to keep you dry, and riding in the rain is actually quite painful when it hits your face.
Yesterday, while scooting home, it started to rain fairly hard. I was on a small highway, fairly crowded as it was rush hour, and because the road was rapidly becoming a river, I decided to pull over and wait for it to pass. After a few minutes, the rain lightened, and I got back on the scooter...only to find that it was dead. As soon as I discovered this, the rain picked up again and I spent the next half hour getting drenched while trying to decide how best to get out of this predicament.
After getting honked at by a number of passing cars, a policeman pulled over, and helpfully yelled from a bullhorn that the shoulder of the road was not a safe parking spot. After explaining to him that, in fact, I was not parked here for pleasure but out of necessity due to my scooter's untimely death, the policemen took a look at the battery, found that I had blown a fuse, and somehow managed to temporarily repain my scooter using a piece of my metal ID badge from work. I was back on the road in five minutes - soaked to the skin, but moving nonetheless.
