Typhoon

Since people have been asking, rest assured that despite the images of Taiwan while Typhoon Morakot passed over it, I remain entirely unaffected by it. I wasn't even aware of some of the news since we don't have a TV. Not a mudslide or a collapsing hotel in sight from where I live. I'm nearly bang in the middle of a skyscraper-dominated city - Taipei - and although I'm not so far from a river, there's a dirty great motorway between me and it, and the elevator is built on a bank of ground about twenty feet high. The stuff about mudslides and the rest is the kind of thing that, as far as I know, only affected isolated villages in mountainous areas hundreds of miles from where I am which happen to be uniquely vulnerable.

That said, things do shut down here whenever a typhoon is on its way. A couple of public services shut down and quite a few businesses, so it's a bit like a Bank Holiday back home. It rains and it gets very, very, very, very windy. This typhoon in terms of my own personal experience was much like any other I've experienced since I got here in that it was, er, weirdly fun the few times we ventured out.. Not fun for people getting washed away by mud, certainly, but that's not something I have to worry about where I am. The only thing that's freaked me out since I got here are the earthquakes, and I'm kind of used to them now.