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The Taiwan Diaries
Volume 11
(06.23.03)
Volume 11! Only 2 more after this!
Poor Noah!
We are smack dab in the middle of rainy season and let me say several four letter words come to mind to describe it and none of them are nice. Let me paint a picture for you. The sky is always gloomy and overcast. I don't think I've seen the sun in weeks. It rains everyday. Sometimes only for a few hours, sometimes all day non-stop. I think the record so far is all day and all night non-stop for 5 days. I'm not kidding. It pours and pours and pours and then it rains in sheets. Light rain is rare and sprinkles are practically unheard of. I'm sure you all remember my hot pink scooter. Well, needless to say it doesn't have a roof and despite my "waterproof" rain gear, I still manage to walk in to work soaked everyday. When you drive in the rightmost lane at 20-30 mph, the cars whizzing past you spray water all over you. However, sometimes it rains so hard that I don't know if a car is spraying me or if it is just raining that hard. I feel like a drowned rat and I think everything I own smells like wet dog. Now let me mention the humidity. It's at 100% everyday. So not only do we have rain but it is hot and very humid. When I look out my window in the morning it actually looks like a sauna...and feels like it too. You are probably wondering how in the world it doesn't flood when it rains that much. Well, frankly I have no answer to that question. Maybe since it is so hot and humid it evaporates really fast and further saturates the air. Who knows! All I know is that everyday I look out of my window hoping to see sunshine and after seeing the view I hope that my rain gear has dried in the night.
Ray of Sunshine
Well, not really sunshine but a funny story having to do with the rain. Somehow it got really windy and there was a tornado. The bulk of the damage occurred in a smaller outlying town. However, somehow in my city, the wind lifted a car up off the ground spun it through the air. This flying car somehow dislodged an umbrella that was on someone's balcony. Open or not the paper didn't say. This umbrella went flying through the air and somehow with enough force lodged itself in the power box on the side of another building. The umbrella also hit it in just the right spot that it knocked out power for my whole city! That's right the power for a city of 2.5 million people was knocked out for 20 minutes because an umbrella hit the power box. I had to teach in the dark for 20 minutes. Amazingly enough the children didn't go too crazy.
Earthquake!
You would think that tornadoes and torrential downpour would be enough inclement weather to last a while but we had an earthquake too! My city isn't on a fault line, which is lucky, but there is a fault line next to us. Usually we barely feel the quakes at all. Mostly we read about them in the newspaper the next day. However, one hit as close to our city as it possibly could. It was 6.5 on the Richter scale which isn't huge but that isn't small either. The epicenter was in the ocean but we felt the rumbling and believe me it didn't feel like a fat kid running down the hall. It made me feel a little queasy and stuff rattled and rolled off tables. It was weird. Luckily no damage was reported anywhere. Or maybe it just washed away in the rain before anyone found it.
Good Grief
So on the list of natural disasters we've had disease (SARS), an earthquake, a tornado, torrential rains and guess what comes this week...a typhoon! I came out of class one night last week at 6:40. It is supposed to be dusk at 6:40. Strangely, the sky was bright yellow. Everything looked yellow. "What is wrong outside now?" I asked and one of my kids said that yellow sky means a typhoon is coming. I thought he was kidding but the other kids and my staff backed him up. The next morning I picked up a paper and low and behold a typhoon would hit Taiwan the next day. Just when you think it can't rain anymore we get another 5 days and nights of non-stop rain and high winds. When do we get the rainbow is my big question. Most locals say not until mid-August. That's a whole lot more rain!
Just like Jackie Chan
Okay, enough whining about the rain for a little while. Many of you know I will be traveling through Asia when I finish here in 2 months. In order to prepare for my trek I have to get tons of shots. I had a band-aid on my arm from a shot and one of my kids asked what it was. So I drew a needle on the board and motioned like I was sticking myself in the arm. All the kids nodded and said they got shots sometimes too. Then they lifted up their left shirt sleeve and every single kid had a scar the size of a dime on their left arm in exactly the same place. I was amazed. I thought it wasn't possible that every kid had the same scar. So for the rest of the night I went around looking at kids arms. I'm sure they all thought I was nuts. But sure enough, every single kid and all of my Chinese
staff have the same scar. I was told that when they are babies they get shots and then later whenever they receive shots it is in the same place. I asked my Chinese TA if every Chinese person has this, even movie stars? She said of course. Even Jackie Chan has one!
Factoid
Three years ago, during rainy season, Kaohsiung (my city) received the average yearly rainfall for the whole of the UK in 9 hours. 9 hours! Now that's a lot of rain!
I got this one out a little early this month because everything has been sopping wet and I spend a lot of time indoors. It actually was sunny all weekend and isn't supposed to rain this week. We'll see though. Hope you are surviving the blazing heat!