Typhoon Madness

The worst storm in 50 years. That is what they are saying. It was hands down the biggest I have seen. Two weeks ago, they were reporting that Taiwan would have to start rationing water because all of the reservoirs were reaching critical levels. (We haven't had much rain this year.) After 12 hours, all the reservoirs were overflowing. It rained for 48 more hours after that. The hotel next to the one were staying at in TaiDong fell into the river. You can see that here.

Our house was fine. We didn't leak at all but our neighbor was gone for the weekend and his balcony drain got plugged, so his whole apartment filled up. The elevators in our building stopped working, too. Thankfully, we live on the 3rd floor and not the 20th. The worst thing for us is that all the city's water supplies have been tainted. So we now will not have running water for at least three days. It has only been 24 hours and I am already itchin' for a shower. I usually have two a day and wash my hands obsessively. You don't realize how much you use water until you don't have any.
Dishes. Toilets. Brushing your teeth. Washing your hands. Showering. Cleaning. Laundry. Come Thursday, I am going to be going mad.
Thankfully, I have it much better than a lot of the people in this city. While driving to work today, many areas looked like a war zone. Soldiers were out helping people move all of their furniture out into the street to be taken away. Many of them had water two meters high on their first floors. My physiotherapist said he came downstairs to find his fridge and washing machine floating on their sides. His scooter and car are ruined. 1000s of pigs and cows drown in the floods. Which need to be cleaned up quickly to ward off disease. Actually, today I asked my junior high students if they had seen that on the news. They said they had. I then told them how I had gone there today and found that if you sharpened a stick really well, you could walk around and poke the dead carcasses with the stick. They all kind of nodded but didn't question why I would do that. So I then acted the next bit out while saying, "You can also just stab them over and over with the stick like this... but it smells bad." Total silence. I then started laughing and went on with the lesson.

There were pictures in the newspaper today of hands sticking out of the mud on riverbanks. It is pretty awful. I couldn't imagine being the people trying to clean their homes after that. I said to Jenny, I would just want to move.

Almost every area we visited on our 4 day holiday last week are destroyed. Every place we visited was the worst hit. We are so lucky we drove home when we did. I couldn't imagine being caught in that.

Anyways, I am going to go sit with my stinky wife now. And maybe poke her with a sharp stick.