Mangkhut

You may or may not have seen the news about Typhoon Mangkhut sweeping across South Asia. Its just left a ton of devastation in the Philippines and is now heading over to the Pearl river delta region of China. This includes Hong Kong, Macau and Shenzhen.

Quick weather fact. A typhoon differs from a cyclone or hurricane only on the basis of location.^[2] A hurricane is a storm that occurs in the Atlantic Ocean or northeastern Pacific Ocean, a typhoon occurs in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, and a tropical cyclone occurs in the south Pacific or Indian Ocean.^[2]

So in true Chinese style we’ve seen a mixture of Wal-Mart panic buying to the usual testing of massage chairs in the 9Square Mall. Nothing stops an afternoon sleep. Not even the impending destruction of a T9 super typhoon named after a rather tasty fruit.

Our good old British keep calm attitude saw us take an early morning trip over to Hong Kong. Yes, keep calm and visit Marks and Sparks for tea and other British supplies. Hong Kong has it’s perks, and is quite handy as western style refuge, however the costs compared to Shenzhen are crazy. The metro trip alone quadruples in price. Saying that, compared to the London Underground it’s still a fraction of the cost.

Back to this typhoon stuff. We used to live on the top of a hill in Brighouse, so you could say we are used to a lot of wind. I mean, how much worse can it get then a typical February gale force storm? The UK met office names them now days, so surely we’re hardened to this type of seasonal weather by now.

Our local government have issued a warning to everyone with a mobile phone. Here’s a copy of the message which I have conveniently pasted into Google translate.

Next to the elevators in our building there is a similar message. They also recommend taping up the corners of all windows in the apartment. I’ve got a small role of sellotape but I’m not sure that’s going to keep our patio doors in place should a typhoon hit us.

The path of Typhoon Mangkut could change either way before it gets to us around mid morning tomorrow. Hopefully, it’ll swing by and miss us by a few 100km, just leaving us with some bad rain for a few days.

I’ll post an update tomorrow. Assuming we have internet and power.