Adventures in the Student Center

A quick anecdote that I've already e-mailed most of my family and friends about:

After class on Thursday, my classmates and I went to the Student Center to grab lunch/dinner before going out for the night. We were all a little tired and dazed from midterm exams, but after we got some food in us, we all perked up considerably. Just as we were finishing up our food, I tried to take in a breath, and suddenly couldn't breathe. It felt like my throat was on fire and had just closed up. I coughed and tried to take another breath, and my nose started burning like crazy. I looked around, and two women sitting at the table behind us asked me if I could breathe. I shook my head, and turned to look at my classmates, and all of a sudden, they all started coughing. For a moment, we thought it was sort of funny, but then we all realized we couldn't breathe at all. So I grabbed my bag and abandoned my lunch and ran for the nearest exit, my classmates hot on my heels. Once outside, we had to sit down on the steps until the coughing and wheezing and tearing subsided. My throat and nose continued to burn for hours afterwards.

Some of the workers in the center told us it was something like pepper from the kitchens, but I don't know how that much pepper could have gotten into the air so quickly and so suddenly. Our first inclination was that it was mace or tear gas or something to that effect, though that would have been more in place on a college campus in Korea in the late 1980s/1990s, maybe not so much in Taiwan in 2008. But in any event, it was a slightly scary experience, having the air around you suddenly become completely un-breathable. As far as I can tell, none of us suffered any lasting effects, so hopefully it was just something benign, like pepper, and not anything chemical.