Just a Drill

So I was sitting in my apartment working on the computer the other afternoon. Suddenly, a really loud alarm started going off outside. My first thought was that it was just another advertisement truck blasting their message over a loudspeaker. But it was LOUD and weird, so I went out to my balcony to see what was going on. It sounded like an air raid siren and it went on for like ten or fifteen seconds. I thought maybe the Chinese were about to bomb us.

"This better not be about the World Games," I thought. "There's no way I'm dying because of professional tug-of-war and korfball."

I looked down at the street and there were police officers all over the place, blowing whistles and pulling everyone over. Every car and scooter on the street pulled over, turned off the engine, and sat there.

And there they sat for like 15-20 minutes. No joke! I know because I watched them sit there for a good majority of the time, trying to figure out what was going on. If a random scooter headed down the street--oblivious to the lack of traffic--a police officer would blow a whistle and they would pull over too. Lots of people got out of their vehicles and went inside nearby stores...for the air conditioning I guess. I only saw one or two other people looking down at the street from their apartment balconies, so I thought that either everyone is at work or this is not that strange. I left a couple times to see if there was any mention of this online, maybe a planned drill of some sort in Taichung. I didn't find anything. (Picture: no traffic down the entire street).

Then after fifteen or twenty minutes, the alarms went off again, and traffic resumed. (Picture: traffic resuming).
When I went to work, they said it was an air raid drill. Cool! I've never been in an air raid drill before! I guess my assumption about the Chinese bombing us wasn't that far off. Except for the lack of actual bombs of course.

I'm not sure what halting traffic accomplishes during an air raid. So when we die we can be stationary? Seems like we don't even need an alarm. I think if I saw bombs falling from the sky I'd get the gist...