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Saturday, August 8, 2009

Our First Typhoon...

... has so far been uneventful. But really, from the images we've been seeing from the rest of the island, we're really grateful to not be experiencing it.

Thursday at work everyone was getting excited about the first big typhoon of the season heading straight for the island. Taiwan gets hit with a dozen or more typhoons a year, usually starting in late May, but this year the season started late (as did the monsoon season in greater south Asia). Thursday night CNN was predicting a category 4 on a 5 point scale and even mentioned the word "super typhoon" a few times which had us a little freaked out.

We followed the direction of our coworkers and stocked up on water, food, and batteries for the flashlight, then preceded to make ourselves comfortable in our tiny one bedroom abode.

We woke up Friday morning to a definite storm outside but were surprised when early afternoon it lightened up to almost nothing--- Pizza Hut was even delivering pizzas! CNN still focused on the Philippines and southern Taiwan which was really getting battered and we had a hard time finding out what to expect here in Taipei. At this point the storm was downgraded to a category 2.

Finally, we found a good website for seeing the satellite images like the one below and it turns out we're in the eye of the storm, so more's still to come.



Now its early Saturday evening and the day was drizzly with no high winds that we can see. Restaurants were open and schools were closed. Everyone's acting like its all over yet if you look at the satellite images it seems more is still to come. I don't know how this all works. Of course, better safe than sorry, so we're staying in. :-)


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