Typhoon Sinlaku

My first weekend in Taiwan is almost over now. I had planned a whole bunch of exciting activities together with the other students. We wanted to go hiking on the nearby mountain, explore Taipei and surrounding areas and join some of the Moon Festival (Mid – Autumn Festival) activities. Instead of all that, a typhoon came.

I guess typhoons are pretty common in Taiwan over the summer. Ever since the middle of next week, we were receiving these warning messages.. a typhoon is coming.. We were advised to prepare enough food and water, flashlights, a radio and bunch of other stuff. The power might go off at any time. The international students were walking around with concerned looks on their faces, but soon decided to follow the example of local students, who didn’t seem bothered and were certainly not getting the emergency supplies ready. Soon, more warning messages followed. Please secure all the windows and stay inside at all times. All the campus activities for the weekend were cancelled. Still, the locals remained calm. 

On Friday afternoon, it started raining heavily, and it hasn’t stopped since then – at the time I’m writing this, it has been raining for over 50 hours non-stop. The river just outside the campus, normally a little stream with hardly any water inside, can barely hold all the water inside. Walking anywhere outside means walking in several centimeters of water at all times. It really is a little waterworld.

However, it hasn’t looked anything like a major natural disaster. There have been hardly any winds at all – apparently, on the Eastern coast of Taiwan, the typhoon reaches 100 mph, but the mountains block the winds and protect Taipei. There is a youtube video from a typhoon in Taipei last year, with traffic signs flying around, but that hasn’t been the case in this one.

So in the end, most people do end up staying inside the dorms. Outdoor activities are nonsense in this weather, and half the shops are closed anyways. Most people sit by their computers, or sit in the cafeteria, or walk around with bored looks on their faces. I even went downtown with Ester, an Italian exchange student, on Saturday, but there isn’t really much to do. Few people in the streets, few open shops. There wasn’t anything dangerous about this typhoon though. We even saw some Taiwanese doing at least a little bit of their usual Moon festival celebrations. Normally, they are supposed to get together with friends and family, have barbecues and watch the full mean, which should be extraordinarily big at this time. Good luck trying to spot the moon in this weather though. So these guys were sitting on the sidewalk, just outside a shop and still protected from the rain, doing a little barbecue on a gas burner. Well, at least something. 

I went around the campus on Sunday to take some typhoon pictures. Those are coming in my next post.