Typhoon Morakot

Meet Typhoon Morakot. This was the satellite shot of the storm on Friday and Taiwan is pretty much hidden under the red part. It started on Thursday when we noticed it was not only rainy but really windy and as we drove through town we noticed tape on all the store shop windows and even some sand bags along some of their entrances. It wasn't long before we heard word that a typhoon was on it's way. I guess when there is a typhoon coming everything shuts down and much of the time nothing really comes of it other than a rowdy storm. Only once in a great while does it cause a lot of trouble.

On Friday morning the streets were largely empty and though the wind was really blowing and it had been raining, it wasn't really down-pouring as we headed for the car. The picture is steamy looking because, imagine that, the camera kept steaming up- but enlarge the pic and you can see Nathan, Kohen and Aly walking through a carpet of fallen palm fronds and other fallen debris. I don't know if the picture shows it very well but the wind was blowing with serious purpose. I really feel bad for half of the population who ride scooters everywhere. They wear long rain slickers usually but still, it all runs off and soaks their pants and shoes. We also saw one gust of wind about knock a guy off of his scooter, he had to put his foot down to keep from falling.

The storm was supposed to really hit it's stride Friday evening. By then Nathan had gone to the store and secured some flashlights for us and we had some extra food just in case. You have to know the storms can be intense just from the style of most of our apartment windows (and some of the houses we looked at before) they have this type of double window with a drain in the middle. I think it is in case your outer window breaks or leaks and the water will drain out properly.

We decided to start a Typhoon Tradition since often with these storms things will be canceled and we'll be at home together. We weren't that creative this time but under the circumstances we felt pretty good about our party. We had stopped earlier and found a few American treats- M&M's and some kind of sweetish popcorn (weird but the kids didn't complain)- and as the sun went down and the storm really got under way we turned on our families favorite movie on my laptop, Singing In The Rain and snuggled up with one another as the wind and rain roared outside.

After the children had gone to bed there were only a handful of gusts of wind that made me think for sure our windows were going to shatter, other than that we couldn't really see much of what was going on outside so it was just scary sounds. In the morning I was so surprised to hear nothing. It was completely quite. The wind and rain had stopped and the sun even shone through the clouds once in a while.

There were lots of broken trees, the one above was impressive and had actually taken out part of a metal fence, but most were large branches of trees and smaller trees. Apparently the storm dropped around 39 inches of rain which is nothing to bat an eye at and part of the island was out of power for a time, though not us. Oh, and the apartment pool was missing at least a foot of water whipped out by the wind and impressive when you think how much rain also fell. Overall, we were warm (always warm) and safe inside which seems like as good a place as any to ride out your first typhoon.