Typhoon Day!

I'm so excited, tomorrow has been declared a Typhoon Day!

Today started out beautifully, temperatures in the low 90's with a good breeze, and it was not too humid. By early evening, the breeze turned into a strong gust and it started to rain. It is around midnight right now, and it is raining cats and dogs. I head over to the supermarket at 9pm, and it was buzzing with people stocking up on instant noodles and talk of typhoons.

The City of Taipei has declared tomorrow (Monday) a Typhoon Day (Typhoon Fung-Wong), which means government offices are closed, as well as schools and businesses (it's like a Snow Day, but with rain and strong wind instead of snow up to your elbows). It also means no class and no work for Jean...whoopeee!!! A Taiwanese friend prepped me on how to brace for a typhoon - stock up on water, instant noodles, bread/non-noodle foodstuffs, and candles/flashlights. She also informed me that playing mah-jong, watching DVDs, and drinking are mainstays of typhoon day culture (I like that she listed drinking as an activity).

I remember when I was just a wee lass growing up in one of the desert suburbs of Los Angeles, having heard that other kids get to stay home on Snow Days, and wishing so hard and long for a Snow Day that never came. As I recall, there was a brief hailstorm once in the mid-80s in sunny Southern California, but the hail pellets just dusted the ground, never accumulating enough volume or posing a sufficient threat to close down the school. I felt cheated.

Technically, this is not my first Typhoon Day, I remember having experienced one in my youth on one of my vacations visiting Taipei with my family - staying indoors all day playing (and fighting) with my siblings, and when finally allowed to go out to the streets, only to see a ghost town with not another person in sight, bits of broken signs and wreckage strewn all over. Because I was on vacation that time and didn't have to take a day off from school, I can't really consider that to be a proper Typhoon Day, after all, taking a day off from my vacation would mean that I'd have to go to school, right? Tomorrow will be my first REAL Typhoon Day because class will be cancelled. Never mind that I came here on my own volition to learn Chinese and am hungry to soak up every bit of Mandarin that comes my way, I still get a thrill from being a student, and as far as students go, a day without class is a good day.