Typhoon. To the average person reading this, the word "typhoon" may trigger alarm or fear. I often find myself using the word "typhoon" as an exaggerational adjective (Who me, exaggerate? By the way, I'm not totally sure that exaggerational is actually a word) that describes the scene at our wedding reception. For those of you who were there or even those who have been held hostage long enough to see our brilliantly produced (thanks Pete) wedding DVD, I actually am not that far off on the description.
To be precise, a typhoon is a tropical cyclone that forms in the northwest Pacific Ocean. More specifically, they form in the within the Pacific Ocean from Asia, north of the equator, and west of the international date line. Storms from the Eastern and Central Pacific crossing the date line are re-designated as typhoons. And if you're interested, the word "typhoon" comes from the Chinese 颱風/台风 (pinyin: tái fēng; Jyutping: toi4fung1). Whatever that translates to. Thanks Wikipedia. To make it easier to relate to, a typhoon is simply a hurricane on this side of the world.
On September 13th the fourth typhoon to hit Taiwan this season made landfall. Typhoon Sinlauku. Each typhoon is given a name, but not after a person. Instead, they generally refer to animals, flowers, astrological signs, and a few personal names. Typhoon names are submitted years in advance and can be recycled. The name of this past typhoon, Sinlauku was last used in 2002. "Sinlauku" refers to the Legendary Kosrae Goddess. I can't seem to find too much information on this legendary Goddess so we'll just have to take it at face value.
The storm was in and out of tropical storm and typhoon status. At it's strongest it may have been a category 2 storm, but I'm not sure where it was parked at that strength. It was a super slow moving storm, creeping along at about 8 miles per hour (seriously, I can walk faster than that) and therefore dumping massive amounts of rain for a long period of time. The rain began on Friday and it rained and rained and rained...today (Tuesday) is the first time I've seen a blue sky since last Thursday! Oh my goodness, it rained so hard. It rained in a million different directions and you couldn't see a thing for a few minutes. The it would slow down, but never actually stop. I'm pretty sure I've never seen so much constant rain. With all the mountains around us I expected to see some scary wind action. I think strongest winds we felt were early on Saturday morning and after that there wasn't much of anything.
Luckily, we never lost power, cable or the Internet. Thank goodness because I don't even have a candle here (not to mention that I don't know where to get one either). We watched a lot of Elmo, stuck stickers, ran around outside in the rain, napped and ate. We got totally soaked while venturing out to visit a friend's dwelling nearby and had lasagna, salad and browines a la mode (oh wow everything was sooo good!) and met a few more IBM expats. It was good family boding time, but we're so happy to see the sun shine again!
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