Typhoon Preparations

The Big Golden Arches

by Pa Rock
Cultural Explorer


The sky is still a bright blue with scattered white clouds, but all  of that is fixing to change.  A typhoon is out in the Pacific preparing to blow across Okinawa at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow - fifteen hours from now.  It is now such a certainty that we have been told to plan on staying home tomorrow.  Our last appointments were cancelled this afternoon, and we spent some of that "free" time wrapping our computers and electronics in large garbage bags.

The typhoon was being referred to this morning as "Number Eight" by the local press - and I have no idea why.  Now it has been given the name "Kompasu" which apparently refers to some type of drafting instrument.  I had lunch down by the Sunabe seawall with a friend today.  We could see rain storms out at sea, and the surf was already picking up.

McDonald's at Araha Beach

I was able to leave work one hour early this afternoon.  I skipped the urge to drop by the commissary on my way home (it would have been hectic as people stocked up for the storm), but I got home and decided that I needed a few things.  There is a large grocery/department store about five blocks from where I live, so I took a stroll down there.  I found eggs, diet soda, and English muffins without any assistance, but I had to ask two different people about cooking oil (and am hopeful that I purchased the right thing), and I also had to be led to margarine.  One of the Okinawan shoppers who helped me stopped me on the way out to make sure that I had found everything that I had been hunting.  Nice lady!

The store is called Hamby Town.  It is five or six stories high with elevators and escalators.  I stayed on the ground floor which is where the groceries are located, but I want to go back in a few days and explore the rest of the place.

Meanwhile back at the apartment I am waiting to watch "A Touch of Frost," a British detective show, on the Japanese mystery channel.  Unfortunately I am having to sit through a half-hour Japanese infomercial on special rags that are used for wiping up dog pee.  Ugh!

I took a couple of pictures of the local McDonald's as I walked to Hamby Town.