Sunday, July 10, 2016

The Typhoon Day

This week was my first week of actual teaching. I taught summer camps at one of the school's campuses. It was exciting to teach summer camps again. It is something that I did when I worked at the Iowa Children's Museum. I teach at the smaller campus, so I taught all grades except pre-school and kindergarten. In the morning, I taught a class of 1st-3rd graders. Then in the afternoon, I taught a class of 4th-6th graders. We studied African animals and had a great time. I really enjoyed working with the students. The students work incredibly hard, so I wanted to plan some fun activities.  I played many games with them to show that it is okay to be silly.
Monkey bar silliness on the playground during outside play. 
Early in the week, one of the other teachers messaged us to see if we would be interested in taking a trip to the east coast of the island. The east coast has fewer major cities, plus beaches! We all heartily agreed that it would be a fun way to spend the weekend. Another teacher commented that we might want to watch the weather, because a typhoon was coming. It wasn't just any typhoon, it was already declared a super typhoon. The news also said that it would possibly be the biggest typhoon in fifty years. We decided to watch the weather to see if it would still be okay to go. I looked up the weather (below). Below is also the satellite picture of Typhoon Nepartak. 


In Minnesota, we would get snow days off when the roads were unsafe to drive on. In Namibia, students would have rain days. During rain days, students would be let out of school early so they could walk home before the rains came. In Taiwan, they have typhoon days. Whether or not their would be a typhoon day was talked about throughout school by both teachers and students.  There was also The Taiwanese staff told me that I should stock up on food, just in case. The foreign staff told me that it wouldn't amount to much where we were. Taichung in on the west side of Taiwan and on the other side of mountains from the ocean. I was eating dinner when I heard that Friday had officially been declared a typhoon day by the government. That meant that all government buildings (including schools) would be closed. Many other businesses would also choose to close. I went to a FamilyMart close to my apartment to get some supplies, just in case. We had already decided to cancel our weekend trip to the east coast. 
Here are my typhoon supplies. 
The typhoon was supposed to hit Taichung at about 3:00 am on Friday morning. On Thursday night I went to bed, not sure what I would wake up to in the morning. I woke up to cloudy skies, but it was not raining. The weather was calm. I stayed in my apartment waiting for the winds to pick up and the rains to start. I waited. And waited. And waited some more. It rained a little, but not much. The typhoon ended up going south of Taichung. 
All is calm. 
 The eastern and southern parts of Taiwan were hit a great deal harder (watch video below). 


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