Of Typhoons...

These past few days in Tokyo have been very prominent for Mother Earth. Over the weekend typhoon #4 came through. It's been cool and rainy for a couple of weeks now, but at some point the rainy season morphed into typhoon season (apparently typhoons signal the end of the rainy season, although typhoons just bring more rain). On Friday or Saturday one of my housemates mentioned to me that a typhoon was headed for Nagoya but he didn't seem to think it would affect Tokyo. Well, on Sunday it came through. Early, early sunday morning I awoke to the sound of heavy, quickly falling rain. As it was too early to be awake I went back to sleep hoping it would be over by the time I needed to leave for work. It wasn't. It was much too heavy to ride my bicycle, but I had rainboots and an umbrella so I felt equipped enough to walk to the station. Needless to say, I got wet. Really wet. It was extremely windy so the rain was coming at me from all sides. I passed up the chance to take the bus, not understand how truly wet I could get. The walk was about 15 minutes and at the end I was absolutely soaked. I mean soaked! Through and through. I could have wrung out half of my shirt, and the water in my pants could have filled a 2 liter bottle of water. Slight exaggeration, but it actually took me over an hour to completely dry.

And that was only the first half; a typhoon, like it's identical twin the hurricane, has two halves with the eye in between. In one of my last lessons on that day I got to talking with my student about the typhoon and he said (not verbatim) that we could expect the second half around 6pm. Then he showed me the weather report in the newspaper which tracked the path of the typhoon - down to the hour! And sure enough, it was due to hit Tokyo at 6pm on Sunday. I had planned on running some errands after work but he strongly cautioned against it. I was convinced - I certainly didn't want a repeat of the morning! After the lesson I relayed this information to the other teacher working that day and he said that he too had heard the same news. 6:00 came and went, however, with no rain. After work I reconsidered running errands - it still wasn't raining that hard and I could hypothetically cut my trip down to less than 10 minutes, so I went for it. I dashed out of the station, down the street and into the store. I zeroed in on my intended item and swiftly made the purchase. That might be the fastest shopping trip I've ever made. Except then I saw the umbrellas. Umbrellas are a highly developed accessory in Tokyo and I really enjoy observing parades of umbrellas on rainy days, and parasols on the sunny ones. Thinking it was still the rainy season I thought to myself, I've seen so many pretty umbrellas... I want one too! I quickly glanced outside in a feeble attempt to gauge the weather (rain can quicken or slacken on a dime; looking outside was pretty ineffective) and judging it to be sufficiently non-threatening I decided to buy one. Which is another mild story in itself. It might be ironic if I had left the store with two umbrellas in a downpour - still getting wet because one umbrella can only do so much, but of course you can't use two - but it actually never poured. As it turns out the second half of the typhoon veered away from Tokyo.


and then I found 10 yen. (today)