The first day of August came with an emergency alert on our phones warning us about the heatwave tormenting the Korean peninsula. I couldn’t be sure but that’s my best guess. Clearly, temperatures have soared to 40 degrees C, our apartment feels like a furnace, there are hardly any people on the road during afternoons and my perfectly healthy succulent bought few months ago from the fantastic cactus greenhouse in Ilsan Lake Park shrivelled up and died. A few hours spent outdoors with a friend visiting from overseas gave me a heatstroke, so what else could the warning be about? That’s how I narrowed it down.

Latest heatwave alert received on my phone while I was enjoying a cup of tea at a cafe in Seoul

Over an year in Seoul and I’m still getting used to these text alerts from the government which when received makes the phone vibrate in one long stretch and are always in Korean which I cannot read. Only few month back, as a new arrival in this country, especially during the time when nuclear tensions were flaring between North Korea and the U.S, these alerts if any, would scare the bejesus out of me. They still do and on most occasions not only am I jumping out of my skin trying to calm an angry, bleating hand phone, I’m clueless about what it has to say and desperate to find out!

Couple of articles on the subject have led me to believe that these warnings are mostly about extreme weather conditions, air pollution, fires and other possible dangers. So, instead of panicking about everything that could go wrong, these days I am able to make one plausible assumption about the cause of these mystifying alerts. And that is strangely comforting.