To commemorate today's rain, let's have some flood protection.

To commemorate today's rain, let's have some flood protection. While Europe was suffering a drought this year combined with heat, we here in Taiwan had more than enough rain. (Did I say "had"? It's not over yet.) The rain got our temperatures down, leading to the funny phenomenon that Germany had often slightly higher temperatures than (sub) tropical Taiwan. The rain was partially so bad that for the first time this year I saw the government announce work and school free days due to rain. (It wasn't just the rain, it was the flooding.)

Having experience with annual rainy seasons and typhoons (except this year, not a single typhoon so far), Taiwan has taken a number of precautions: Almost all buildings on our campus are for example "elevated", meaning I need to get up a number of stairs to get into the building, even if I want to go to the basement. There is one building where this is not completely the case, the student activity centre with the cafeterias.

In such cases, we have metal walls that can be installed between slots on both sides of an entrance, here seen at the entrance to the cafeterias. The third photo was taken on the fourth floor of the foreign language building. For natural cooling, most buildings are open for the wind to blow through. But to keep the rain out, we had to step over this little barrier, even up high...