Typhoon Sinlaku disturbs the Mid-Autumn Festival

According to Chinese tradition, this weekend is marked by the Mid-Autumn Festival 中秋節 (pinyin: zhong1 qiu1 jie2). There are many different versions of the stories related to the origin of this festival, which is equivalent to Thanksgiving. Anywhere in the Chinese world, however, this festival is a reason for family reunions, which are accompanied by devouring many moon-cakes 月餅 (pinyin: yue4 bing3), small pastries with different stuffings. Ours have a stuffing of sweet red bean paste and salted duck egg yolks.



In Taiwan, the Mid-Autumn Festival is traditionally accompanied by a big barbecue on Sunday. We even received an invitation to a friend's place and are still looking forward to going there tomorrow. Unfortunately, however, we are currently experiencing Typhoon Sinlaku. Its center actually is still east of Taiwan, but torrential rains are already pouring down on much of northern Taiwan since several hours. Sinlaku moves at an awfully slow pace of only about 7 km/h, which means that the island will still be under the typhoon's influence for maybe two to three more days!
The following shows the most recent of the storm, superimposed onto the terrain.


I made this image by using the cloud animation function of Google Earth, which displays the clouds in a semi-transparent fashion. This offers the advantage that the coastline of Taiwan is still visible.
On the most recent actual satellite image (taken from the website of the Central Weather Bureau of Taiwan), the storm clouds of course appear absolutely opaque, so that all of Taiwan is obscured from view.


The word typhoon is actually the phonetic translation of the Chinese words 颱風 (or 台风 in simplified Chinese; in pinyin: tai2 feng1). It roughly translates as 'wind acting on a platform'. The 'platform' stands for the island of Taiwan itself and describes what impression Taiwan must have made on the early settlers and fishermen who approached the island by boat from mainland China.
The Taiwanese authorities have called today an official 'typhoon holiday'. All this of course means that it is highly questionable whether we'll be able to attend our friend's barbecue party tomorrow.

This weekend is also a very stormy one for friends of ours in Houston TX, who are currently experiencing Hurricane Ike.

With estimated diameters of about 600 km, both Ike and Sinlaku are actually of comparable size.