September 20, 2010
Well today we had Typhoon Fanapi hit Xiamen DaXue, which was seriously destructive. Apparently 70 people died from it in the province below us. I suppose we are lucky, but seriously I was absolutely SHOCKED to see how many people were completely unfazed by the typhoon. There were several people outside walking around (more like blowing in the wind, trying to keep their feet on the ground) with umbrellas inside out and their eyes shielded from the wind. Seriously I cannot understand what was so important that they had to go out in a storm like that. I wonder if maybe they just felt like their jobs were more important than their safety or possibly they didn’t realize they were in danger. Clearly I am not in any position to try and understand the reason behind their madness, but I am definitely curious.
We also had another incident in the middle of the night, where our window wouldn’t close, may I remind you that we were in the middle of a typhoon, so it wasn’t just a little annoying to have some wind blowing through the window- it sounded like a train was coming. So luckily Des knew how to ask the front desk if someone could come up to help us fix it. Well we got a sweet little girl who clearly had no idea how to fix it, and when she realized it was definitely broken, she said, “Oh, I don’t know how to fix this. Sorry.” But she said it so nonchalantly, like our window breaking all over our room wasn’t a serious possibility. I suppose they really just didn’t have any other staff working but honestly it wasn’t very reassuring. I wonder if she was in the same situation if she would act the same way or not? Was she just oblivious to the fact that we were in a hurricane? Or did she just not care?
Anyways when we finally made it outside there were still a lot of people outside, and there were SO many trees knocked down. I was surprised to see that there were already workers trying to clean it all up. It was funny to see the reaction of the other people who walked in front of us and across the street. Some acted like it was nothing while others were snapping pictures and obviously looked distraught. I was surprised to see that a few windows on our street had been blown out by the storm, because I thought surely if any windows were to break it would be ours. Who knows why ours survived though.
As far as the whole people going out during the hurricane, it seemed like the people who were working at the cafeteria had been there for hours- which obviously seems obscene. How could an employer expect people to come to work in weather conditions like that? Who knows, maybe their employer didn’t even ask them to come, they just assumed they still needed to? Whatever it is, the sentiments surrounding natural disaster are certainly different than they are in the U.S.
