Bonkers Third Law of Compromise - Typhoons

Yesterday a Typhoon level 8 warning was hoisted for at 3pm. This means we were in for some pretty rough weather and most importantly we were allowed to leave the office and go home. I was pretty excited about the prospect to get home early and maybe chill out watching a dvd.

There's a couple of problems with this whole concept, firstly approximately 6 million people are all leaving school, offices, shops and industry to go home at the same time. You can imagine that getting a taxi is nearly impossible, the public transport system is overflowing with people and the roads are choked. Secondly because shops shut it can really test your forward planning skills for the necessities like food and drink in your own home. Since most HK kitchens are smaller than the bathrooms or non existent.

I sat out the early part of the typhoon in my car for an hour while crawling along the freeway down the east end of the island. Traffic basically stopped to slower than a crawl. Road rage simmering as cars try to push in on other lanes of traffic. I let loose a few expletives to drivers who try to cut in on myself and others.

The typhoon seemed a bit of a non event in the end, producing a bit of wind and rain but no signs of damage anywhere. Most of the boats go into shelters like this one next to my apartment building.

Impact is more personal, our building sealed off the lifts exits to the podium forcing people to go out via the car park. There is nowhere to go either since everything closes, it becomes a ghost town like Launceston on Good Friday.

The kitchen was pretty bare so I had cheese on toast for dinner, watched Las vegas TV series dvd and went to bed. This morning I realised that I had not spent more than 12 consecutive hours in my appartment before and that I have been living like a uni student for the last while. The sad part is the rent costs about fifteen times more then when I was at uni.

Today I went to the supermarket and topped up with supplies ...just in case.