The Return of "Pabuk"

After our disappointment at having to go to work yesterday, I was surprised this morning to wake up and find an alert from the Hong Kong Observatory that we were back under Typhoon Condition One. By lunch time, we were back in Condition Three. An hour later, the Observatory announced it would be hoisting the signal for Condition Eight, and we started turning off our computers and heading home. Pabuk had turned back towards Hong Kong, and had once again strengthened into a tropical storm.

(There's no two, four, five, six or seven, just one, three, eight, nine and ten. There's a history of the warning signals here, if you're interested.)

Here's the map from the Hong Kong Observatory web site at 5 pm this evening. Hong Kong is the big red asterisk.

I left the office sometime around 2:30. I headed towards the bus stop, planning on taking the bus home until I saw the huge lines of people waiting to get on board.


I decided that it would probably take less time to walk home than it would to wait for the bus. It wasn't raining hard at the time, and it wasn't at all windy, and while both picked up during my walk, they have once again subsided. Shelly says the subway system was more crowded than she's ever seen it, and made the Tokyo subway at rush hour seem almost spacious. Getting a little wet during my walk seems like a good trade off.

Everyone had their umbrellas open, even when it was only misting. Hong Kong sidewalks are narrow enough as it is, but it was nearly impossible to dodge the umbrellas today.


Most of the stores in the mall on my route home were closed, though grocery stores were still open when I got home. There's not really any rain or wind, but I suppose it might pick up as the storm moves past us.

At any rate, I'm home early, just like there was a snow day.