My First Typhoon

The same day my little sis' was coming to town, I ended up having an unexpected visitor. This one was a lot louder, noisier, and left much more debris on the streets. This one was a typhoon.

So a typhoon is actually just a hurricane, but they call them typhoons when they happen in the Pacific Ocean and not the Atlantic. I'm not sure why that is. The storm seemed to start about 5 in the morning with very loud wind followed by breaking glass and crashing sounds. It was pretty ridiculous. The sounds subsided around 7 in the morning, so I was able to fall back into sleep.

I carried on with my day basically as any other, eating breakfast and heading to work. The trip to work was definitely interesting, lets just say that I had to dodge a ton of broken glass on the sidewalks because of all the broken glass. I got to work, and my boss and the other teachers were sitting around a table, as it turned out that there was no power to the school as well as a lot of the city.

Yes, classes were cancelled that morning, kind of like a Korean snow day. I decided to use my extra time to walk around with my camera and take as many photos as possible. Here are the results in photo form:

This is a restaurant right next to my apartment, the entire roof was blown off.

Another blown off roof:

At my school a giant billboard was blown off. Apparently it costs a few thousand bucks to replace and they haven't gotten around to it yet. Now the old sign it exposed, saying Jung Chul Yeong Oeh (Jung Chul English).

This place had giant piles of soju bottles. I think they had them all stacked, but then they blew away and they had to sweep them back up.

So this was a giant real estate building with a three story white square arch on it. It was entirely blow down and this is what was left over.

Another view, this one even more awesome.

Here were a bunch of pipes, I'm not really sure why they were there.

A bunch of trees were either broken or blown down to an angle all over town. Here is a few of them.

The entire side of this building had its foam siding blown down to expose the white bricks underneath.

Broken windows were pretty much everywhere, especially with taller buildings where the wind speed was higher.

So the city was pretty much ripped apart with a lot of damage done. Everywhere had signs blown down, roofs ripped off, and windows and broken glass everywhere. The first rain ended up taking away a lot of the broken glass, but theres still some remaining on the streets which can be a hazard for bike tires. There were also four deaths in Korea attributed to the typhoon, with one in Seosan where a man was hit by a shingle from a roof. Definitely one of the more interesting and exciting days of my time in Korea.