Typhoon

We were woken at 5:45am this morning (Thursday) by a text message beep from Nigel's phone. Teacher message chain: No school today. At 6am, Jenalyn answered our housephone - parent message chain - no school for Emily today. There was a typhoon over the whole country. We had breakfast in the living room, looking out our glass wall at the weather outside. It was stormy, but as far as I could tell, just a bit of wind and rain. What's this typhoon business? As the day went on, it became clear. Winds rushed through the area, and I even witnessed a tree fall over into a ditch. Around the city, other trees fell over in the streets. One teacher had moved his car into his garage just in time. An hour later, a tree fell right where his car had been. The fence in the plot next to our building fell over onto the parked cars. At one stage, I saw something fly past our window. What was that? I heard a mighty crash, and looked on the ground - it looked like the bonnet from a car, but I couldn't tell, as we're 11 stories up. Someone picked it up off the road. Luckily no one was under it! Looking out the window the other way, we saw some curtains from 2 floors up fluttering in the wind. Either the wind had sucked them out the small open windows at the top of their living room glass wall, or a whole pane of glass had fallen out of their living room! I hope it was the former, because the thought of one of our glass panes falling out scared the pants off me, especially as the girls love to put their noses on the glass when they look out.

Mid-morning, the power went off, and stayed off. No air-con. No TV. No fans. Things were getting hot & sticky at home, so we thought we'd go out for lunch. Brave the weather, grab a taxi to a mall. Surely they'd have power. Well, we never got to tell, as our lifts were not working. We were literally stuck in our apartment. (In an emergency, we could've carried the girls down 11 flights of stairs in the dark to the back of the building, but I didn't fancy that now.) Luckily we didn't go out. We later heard stories of cars trying to get through metre deep water in places. And most of the shops just closed. The 7-11, open 24 hours, was open, and selling by candlelight!

By dinner time, the lifts were working, (but still no electricity) and we went for a walk in the much calmer, but still windy weather. We found somewhere to eat dinner - Good old McD's. They had generators going, so we enjoyed the air-con, and didn't mind that we had to wait in the queue for half an hour! Seems lots of others had the same idea.

The walk there, only a couple of blocks away, was eye-opening. Street-lights and traffic lights were out. Most shops shut, mangled umbrellas lying in the streets, branches and whole trees everywhere. While we were out, we got another txt on the teacher chain: school cancelled tomorrow again for students, but teachers are to come in anyway, for a late start.

Now here we are, in the evening, still no power. The girls have gone to sleep in their underwear, and Nigel's managed to hook the fan up to the emergency generator switch, which the fridge is connected to. So we'll at least have some airflow tonight, and hopefully, Zoe's heat rash won't get any worse. Luckily, the typhoon has cooled the air a bit, it's only 28 degrees.