Cyclone 8 Warning

Today we are under a cyclone 8 warning. There are four levels of warnings 1, 3, 8 & 9. Prior to this we have never gone beyond a 3 during our stay. Typhoon Nesat is actually about 350 km. south/south west of us and will not get any closer than it is now. 


Cyclone 8 means that schools and all public offices and consulates are closed. The ferries and the trams and the large buses are not running. Many businesses are closed and the city is very quiet. It also means my kitchen window is constantly whistling.


Around noon there was a lull in the action and I went to meet Ken and Rom for lunch. It is just a couple of blocks from here with much of it under cover. It certainly is an eerie feeling to see a city that bustles at all hours so completely calm and quiet. I took my camera along and got some very interesting shots - at least to us.


The building next to us recently had all of the bamboo scaffolding taken down and against the cloudy sky it looks stunning.

After walking down our hill, I came out on Hollywood Road. This street is one of the busiest in Central during the work day, especially at lunch time.

This particular section of Hollywood Road is lined with shops, restaurants, antique stores and galleries. It bustles...

...on most days.


We walked down beneath the travelator where you normally have to stretch out your elbows just to get some walking space.

Though many of the restaurants were closed, we did find Cochrane's (one of our favorite lunchtime haunts) open. 


After lunch I headed home (not wanting to press my luck since the skies were darkening up again). The old British prison that sits across from our apartment looked especially brooding and made me think of all the stories those walls could tell.

As I got closer to the apartment the skies grew a bit darker.

If the cyclone 8 warning goes beyond 1 P.M., which it has, workers who made it in are free to go home. Some of them may take a little break in their commute.

There is an escalator that helps us get up to the level of our apartment. The lower half runs all of the time and the upper half runs during business hours. Of course the warning trumps all and as the rain started to fall again, I had a bit of a climb to the dry comfort of my apartment.

We are actually very lucky in that this storm is giving us a glancing blow. Twenty-three people died in the Philippines as it crossed by Manila on Tuesday. The flooding was neck high in the streets of some areas and the U.S. Consulate was flooded. We are keeping them in our thoughts and hoping that the storm weakens by its next landfall.