The Deadly Typhoon

        We knew we weren’t all going to make it out alive.  We were trapped in a desolate place, a place where danger presented itself at every turn.  It was a dark and scary time.  Wait, you thought I was talking about a typhoon?  Nope, just my second orientation.

        For this week long orientation, we were split up into our regions, so I was sent to the south with about forty others.  The place they chose for this orientation was definitely a little strange-we were camped out in the mountains at some business retreat in the middle of nowhere.  As far as I could see, it was the perfect setting for a murder mystery.  Forty people in a confined space…and then one by one, they start dying off.  We know someone here has to be the killer, but who?  The quiet Canadian?  The Australian who’s just a little too friendly?  Or maybe, just maybe, the Koreans in our group have teamed up to plot against us.  It explains why they’re always talking to each other in their secret language when we’re around.  Yes, this is what I think about when I’m really bored.

        Anyway, we were doing the standard go-to-lectures-all-day-do-nothing-at-night routine when word started to come in: there was going to be a typhoon.  The biggest typhoon to hit Korea in ten years.  Now, I’ll admit, I had no idea what a typhoon was.  Was it an Asian tornado?  A hurricane?  Would the sky open up and start raining bacon?  I hoped so, but I really didn’t know.  All they told us was that this typhoon was going to hit the south the hardest.  Whatever it was, it was coming for me. 

        The typhoon was scheduled to roll in at 3 AM, so naturally the night before we all hung out outside until midnight waiting for something crazy to happen.  By the time we went to bed, it was kinda windy and drizzling.  MADNESS, I TELL YOU.  So I went to sleep just like normal, but at some point in the middle of the night, I woke up to a CRACK CRACK CRACK sound at my window.  Was it Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston?  Who could say?  Honestly, in my sleepy state, I did think there was somebody outside knocking.  It seemed pretty weird, but I just did what I always do: I went back to sleep.

        I woke up the next morning to steady rain.  Only then did I realize that the sound had been the wind thrashing against the window.  Outside, tall trees had been split in two, and there was some minor property damage, as well.  So I’d survived my first typhoon by sleeping through it.  No surprise there.

 

This is not at all what it looked like.  I just googled typhoon.

                             

        In the end, the build-up and anticipation had been much bigger than the result, but that’s how life usually goes.  However, the area even further south had gotten the worst of it.  There had been fifteen or twenty deaths and much more damage.  As it turned out, my school was in the very deep south.  After we all said our final goodbyes, that’s where I headed next.