Typhoon Kompasu

So Typhoon Kompasu (Japanese for 'compass' - basically 'compass' said in a Japanese accent) hit Korea Thursday morning. I had an afterschool class the previous day and I was asking the students when it will hit and they were all like 'oh, it's supposed to hit tomorrow afternoon'. They were wrong of course because we were woken up at 6 by the howling of winds and battering of rain on the window. We done well not to wake up sooner as all of my friends and co-workers seemed to get woken up at 4 or some other earlier time than us. The teacher who sits next to me in the office (don't know her name... apparently it takes more than 6 months to remember the names of people in Korea) had all the windows in her house smashed out by Kompasu. All the problems I experienced was having to dodge minor debris in the street and an unlit candle falling off the windowsill as the window was slightly open because Casper was starting to stink up the room (did you know cat's can fart? I didn't..). Well here are a couple of pictures of the debris in my 'hood:

This is at the bus stop I take to school everyday. This structure used to be a disused newspaper stand but it had been ripped from it's bolted position in the ground and blown into the road with the other debris.
A day later and some of the trees that had been damaged by Kompasu had been piled up by someone.

School started at 10:10 instead of the usual time of 8:40 because of the typhoon. I thought 'Great, that means I don't have to teach a couple of classes today'. Wishful thinking because rather than just cancel the class they just extended the school day... Imagine that in England? Finishing school and hour and a half later because the schedule had been changed. Wouldn't happen.

My mate Tony has some better pictures of our neighbourhood after the typhoon. I was kind of reading 'The Lost Symbol' on the bus that day and didn't think to take a look around and I missed a lot of the damage :/ Oh well, apparently there is another Typhoon coming next week so second time lucky :)

http://tleeinkorea.blogspot.com/2010/09/typhoon.html - this is Tony's blog where you can see some more pictures.

And here is some information on Kompasu on various websites that I just found after googling 'Typhoon Kompasu':

Satellite image of Kompasu (same as the one at the start of the blog): http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=45603

CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/09/02/typhoon-south-korea.html

Posted in: compass,EPIK,esl,kompasu,south korea,typhoon,typhoon compass,typhoon kompasu