Taipei in September still manufactures a thunderstorm at an hour that feels personal. The sky goes green-gray over the river, the scooters vanish, and the city’s Japanese-era arcades earn their keep for twenty minutes.
You can fight this with a schedule. You will lose. The better habit is to put the thing that can be moved after four, and the thing that cannot — the preschool pickup, the dentist — on the side of town you can reach by MRT. Carry a compact umbrella that you are willing to lose. The 7-Eleven ones are a business model for a reason.
When it breaks, the heat returns as if nothing happened. Night markets open. People eat as if they had not just stood under a leaking awning with a bag of pomelos. This is the climate. It is also the social contract: nobody is late in a way that needs a paragraph. They were in the rain.