Typhoon

I went to sleep very late last night, for many reasons, one of which was it was just too dang hot to sleep. I just felt overwhelmed and oppressed by the heat. My fan did very little to soothe the situation. I eventually fell into a fitful, confusing sleep, full of strange dreams, and lots of tossing and turning. Around 3am I was jarred awake by a sudden crash. It sounded like a big tin thing had crashed into a wall. I tried to just go back to sleep but the wind was crashing into my window, shaking the air in my room and making my door rattle. This continual rattling is what really did me in. I can sleep through thunderstorms, hurricanes, lightning, wind, etc. But constant repetitive noises like my door clicking open and closed, over and over again, are enough to drive me mad.

So I got up, hoping to fix the problem. I jammed folded paper into the crack where the door and the door jam met. This fixed my problem for a couple minutes and I fell back asleep to the howling wind and the rain hitting my window. Then all of a sudden a huge gust of wind burst in and the paper flew out of my door and following directly the hideous rattling. I was pretty much irritated at this point. I got out of bed and opened my bedroom door, which caused the wind to gush in and ferociously tear through our apartment. I looked out my door and saw my house mate Julie frantically running around the laundry room. I didn't really know what she was doing, and I didn't really care so I went back to bed. At about 5am I was awakened again by the sound of an explosion and my fan shutting off. The power was out. A couple hours later I dragged myself out of bed to see what was going on. Everywhere I looked out the windows, power lines were blowing freely in the wind. The rain berated the house angrily and a large quantity of debris was flying around in the streets below.

Hannah announced that it was a Typhoon. How exciting. while we all stood around trying to figure out what to do next there was a massive explosion outside. A bright flash and then a cloud of smoke billowing up into our open windows. The horrible stench of burning rubber and what I can only imagine would be, the smell of electricity. Hannah immediately freaked out and said we should get out. I thought for a minute she might be right, that maybe our apartment building was on fire. I stood there in the door of my bedroom trying to figure out what I should grab in case we needed to exit...Somehow the only thing I really wanted to grab was my teddy bear.

Clearly my priorities are not right.

we decided to stay put as the smoke seemed to be clearing. But the wind and water continued. I got my stuff together to head to class and after walking down six flights proceeded to walk past a giant power line, lying in the middle of the road. A bunch of Koreans started yelling at me and pointing and gesturing. I am pretty sure they were trying to tell me not to lick the end of the exposed wire. I nodded my appreciation for the suggestion and hurried past, far away from the end of the wire and the big dry spot surrounding it.

I got to school only to learn that the bus was running two hours late and I didn't need to be there until 11:30am. So I went back to my apartment to take a nap. On the way back I passed a number of interesting things. A man squatting on the sidewalk collecting fallen berries from a tree that had broken in two on the side of the road. A light pole had fallen over also, possibly helping the tree break, i am not sure how it all went down. There were many many people sweeping the sidewalk, the sound of sweeping was taking over my senses. The most conclusive thing I saw was an abandoned umbrella, lying on a grate, turned inside out by the wind no doubt. It's skin was ripped from its frame and lay flapping there next to it. It was sad and defeated, but mostly passive. I thought it really summed up the general feeling of the morning.

The rest of today was mostly uneventful. We baked cookies at school and the kids were really really good for once. It was a nice short, easy day. We went online to check out the weather situation and this was the first Typhoon in 15 years to hit this area. It was also the most severe typhoon of the year period. How exciting that I could have been here for that!!

Thats all for now folks, more later, as usual...

Michelle