Adventurasia Community

From around midnight Friday through to late Saturday evening, the area that I am living in was pounded by high winds and torrential rains. Every few minutes, the wind would hit with a loud thud against one of the large windows in my apartment. (I live on the 4th floor and there aren’t any tall buildings or trees nearby in which to shield my apartment from the elements). Out of curiousity, I would briefly open the window to see how bad it was, and by the time I shut the window, I was sprayed with water, not to mention the furniture just below the window getting splashed with water.

Saturday morning I was woken up by the sound of rain. It turned out that typhoon Etau was making it’s way through pretty much all of Japan (or so it seemed). According to the National Police Agency, ten people were killed nationwide, along with damage to about 20 homes (some of which was quite extensive). This was the tenth typhoon this season to hit Japan.

A ‘typhoon’ tracking site can be found here: http://www.supertyphoon.com/wpacific/ According to their site SuperTyphoon has been providing the most comprehensive ensamble of satellite imagery, tropical cyclone advisories, and related products from numerous government, military, and educational sources on the Internet since 1995. Here you will find the resources necessary to follow the formation and progress of tropical cyclones worldwide.

CNN.com had a special report on typhoons awhile back. Please click here to view the special report.

Needless to say, I stayed in my apartment the whole day… In the back of my mind, I was a bit worried as a bunch of us had planned to watch the Tokyo Bay Fireworks the next day (Sunday). However, it didn’t look like the rain was going to stop anytime soon. However, my friend told me that the typhoon will pass us later in the evening and Sunday would be very sunny outside — supposedly the hottest day of the year! It was definitely hot on Sunday, although I’m not sure what the temperature is - I would guess that it was in the mid-30s celcius. I even applied some SPF 50+ sunscreen so that I wouldn’t burn! (The sunscreen is very strong here, I think my friend had about SPF 100+ sunscreen!)

On Sunday, we met up in Shimbashi and took the Yurikamome (info is in Japanese) monorail to Odaiba Kaihinkoen station. We exited the station and headed to the ‘Beach‘. I hadn’t realized there was a beach here (not really, I noticed that there was sand etc, but never had I seen so many people on the beach at any one time). Luckily after a few minutes of searching, we were able to find a spot (we got there about 2 hours in advance) for our party of 9. Most of us bought a return ticket except for my cousin, so my cousin and I headed back to the station to get a return ticket - the lineup was already massive as other people had the same idea as us. After about 20-30 minutes, ticket in hand, we returned to our spot.

The fireworks started around 7:00 ish and finished around 8:25 ish. Apart from the Rainbow Bridge partially obstructing the bottom part of the fireworks display, we had an even better view than the Sumida Fireworks event that some of us had seen a couple weeks earlier. Most of us agreed that the Tokyo Bay Fireworks display was much nicer than the ones we saw at Sumida. During the course of the display, various shapes were displayed including: smiley faces, hearts, doraemon (cat), as well as your standard multi-coloured ‘bombs in the sky’. Click here to see some photos taken from a display a couple years ago. (Surprisingly enough, last year on my plane ride leaving Japan, the airline showed a documentary entitled ‘bombs in the sky’ showing how fireworks were being made. I didn’t think it was a very appropriate title given that it was after the 9-11 incident… To top it off, it was one of the american airlines - don’t remember which.)

Anyways, I must have recorded close to an hours worth of the fireworks show, and one day when I figure out how to transfer larger segments of video onto my computer, I’ll post a short video clip.