the offWhites

Soon we’ll have internet access in our apartment and be able to post on a more regular basis. We’re really wishing we’d already had it, because it would have made this past Saturday much less boring. Because seriously, if you can believe it, typhoons are just damned boring. You buy some extra food, you sleep in, then you sit around the house all day. You can’t leave, because you’d be blown out to sea, even if you live 20 miles from the coast. Two or three times an hour we’d hear a noise that is remarkably similar to the one that would, in Kansas, have meant we’d waited too long to go to the basement. But here, if you go to the basement, you might drown. So you stay up on the eighth floor and deal with the wind. Eventually you decide you just can’t take it anymore, your legs are about to atrophy and you need a Coke, and doggoneit you’re going to the convenience store. You don’t make it 30 yards from the front door of the building, but as soon as there seems to be a lull in the storm, you try again.

So I did. I tried again, I made it to Family Mart, and we relished Coke Zero (because the only shop within typhoon time walking distance doesn’t carry Coke Light, which is what Diet Coke is called here) and Doritos and some other stuff I can’t quite remember. In retrospect, beer might have helped the time to pass more quickly, but that might have incited plans like trying to walk to a store that did have Coke Light, and it turns out the lull really was just that. Five minutes after I got home, the wind picked back up to full force, and I would not for anything have been out in it.

Damage was minimal though. The storm was bigger than the island, but thankfully only one person died, and four of the five people who were injured were blown off of their motorcycles while attempting to ride through it. The fifth was hit by falling rocks, while walking, during a typhoon, through a posted falling rock zone. Kind of feels like being at home, except only five people got hurt by doing stupid stuff, rather than numbers that could be the populations of small towns.