The last several weeks have been disappointing. This was supposed to be the monsoon season,
where the gods would pour massive quantities of rain on East Asia. After having lived through this once before I
must say that this year has been rather disappointing. It has been very dry, and very hot. To make things worse, it has also been
unforgivingly humid as well. There have
been a few bouts of rain here and there, bringing a sweet release of cool air,
but they have been few and far between.
Then the news came of Typhoon Bolaven.
I heard about it from a new acquaintance of mine who had his finger much
closer to the pulse of local affairs than many of the locals. I still have to thank him for the moment of
satisfaction I had when I asked one of my local co-teachers if there was any
news or things that Rachel and I should know about before the storm hits. She looked at me very strangely, not having
heard that there was a massive storm heading her way. The anticipation of this storm was quite
palpable. The local governments were
preparing for the worst, mobilizing emergency services, and people were
stretching tape across their windows.
Honestly Rachel and I were rather excited.
It was bad enough for our school to realize that if the public schools
were closing down that they had better close doors too. Now with a day off and a massive storm on the
way, I was getting ready to sit back in a lawn chair, drink in hand, and watch
the storm roll on in. We made sure that
we were well stocked with supplies, extra water, and other goodies, and I must
say that it was all rather disappointing.
Now, I am not under stating the damage that Bolaven has caused. Several people have been killed, many more have
been injured, and there has been a great deal of property damage. But by the time the winds got up to Seoul, it
wasn’t much to worry about. We even went
down to the bank to take care of a new annoyance.
Caution: this next paragraph is filled with ranting and raving about
some petty cell phone issues. If you
really don’t want to pay attention to this digression and want to read more
about the storms, just skip down to the end of the paragraph. Still reading? Right, so I don’t know who, how, what the
fuck happened with our cell phones, but somebody fucked up! I had thought it strange that Rachel had been
getting so many more text and phone calls from random people than I did, and I
just chalked it up to the fact that the
advertisers knew that she was a woman and therefore more likely to listen to
advertisements for Lotte Department store.
Seriously, she has been getting texts from them. Where the fuck was I? Right, anywho somewhere, somehow, someone
fucked up Rachel’s phone bill. How this
happened, when both Rachel and I signed up for automatic bill payments at the
same time, the same way, but apparently something wasn’t correct. Over the last day or two we had been having
trouble making calls and texting, so we just assumed that something was
completely wrong. We then get a phone call from the phone company at work
explaining the situation. So we had to
pay 3 months or so of back payments before moving on to other things.
So for those of you who skipped to here I am calm and everything is
fine now. Typhoon Bolaven has passed and
everything is alright now…well no. As it
turns out there is another major storm heading our way. This one, called Tembin, was hovering off the
Chinese coast because of Bolaven, and is now heading our way. So we are going to get hit not once, but
twice by major storms. The first one was
downgraded from a Typhoon to a tropical storm, and it’s looking like the second
one will be doing the same, but still.
Now Tembin is going to run much, much closer to us than the first one,
and I will be curious to see if it is going to be worse.
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