Adverse Weather

All week Bellevue has been shrouded in fog. Not the death-dealing stuff that's festering in Beijing currently, just cold wet air that saps the warmth out of you if you're dumb enough to walk the mile and a half from the hotel to the office. As the days have passed, the runs I've taken from the hotel have got shorter and shorter, until I fled for ten minutes this morning, before returning shamefacedly to the lobby.

Run out

I got up at 5:30 this morning and ran for ten miles. This wasn't as pleasant as it sounds: while it was a great privilege to be up early, watching the sky turn from a deep shade of royal blue to a lighter gunmetal blue, the experience was spoiled by the sound of me wheezing and the constant thud of my brain deciding to recite racist jokes from the 1970s at me. As fast as I ran, I was trapped with myself.

Heating up

It's getting hotter and hotter. I thought we were just failing to reacclimatise after returning from Canada, but apparently this is the time of year that it gets really hot. I was shocked. I thought it was always hot in Singapore, but if it actually gets hotter in the next few weeks, then it will almost be as if Singapore has seasons.

It's an ill wind...

Two days ago, we were woken up by a huge thunderstorm. At four in the morning our bedroom turned bright white, like the onset of an alien invasion that could only be beaten back by an Scientologist ex-rapper and some cheesy speeches. The thunder crashed, and I wondered if we should regret taking a top floor apartment in the windy part of town.

Jurong Bird Park

I woke after twelve hours of blissful sleep, to hear my wife completing the washing up from last night. (In the old days we'd have paper plates or smash all the glasses, but now we're 'civilised' there's extra work entailed.  It doesn't feel like a progression.  I was planning on spending the whole day being lacksidaisical, but instead, in just three short hours I was propelled out of the flat, down to the MRT station and over to Boon Ley to catch a bus to the Jurong Bird Park.

Rain on Christmas Eve

At breakfast this morning the skies were blue, but as we sat idly drinking coffee and playing cards, the sky began to darken. At around 12 the rain came in, pretty much horizontally, and we fled back to our chalet.

Raining in Bellevue

It's been chucking it down all day, but sadly unlike the well-tempered rain of Singapore, Bellevue's precipitation doesn't cease at a sensible time in the late afternoon.

Chilling in Nova Scotia

After years in Hong Kong, where there are extremes of temperature depending on whether you're indoors or not, yet the weather is basically the same year-round (hot hot hot with a side of humidity), it was strange to wander around Halifax in summer. Here it's hot when you're in the sun, and not hot when you're not in the sun. This was difficult to adjust to; after ten minutes stood on a ferry, going blind from the sunlight reflecting from the sea, the sky, and every glass building on Halifax's downtown, we had to shamble around the town for a couple of hours to recover, stopping only to eat ice-cream/try on dresses/order coffee/waste time in running shoe shops asking idiotic questions about footwear.

Getting colder

It's strange that even though it's ten or twelve degrees warmer in Hong Kong than it was in Canada, it still feels colder. I didn't take my jacket off all day long at the office, and several times I had to put gloves on to stop my hands from going numb. Truly this is the winter of my discontent.

Disasters, with added perspective

I got back home shortly after my girlfriend, which was lucky, because while we'd been out today the cat had been dragging its cat-poo-smeared backside around the kitchen floor, in a futile attempt to wipe it off. Lucky for me, that is, because I arrived just as my girlfriend finished cleaning it up.

But let's put this in perspective: Hong Kong is about to be struck by a terrible disaster, a brutal force of nature that cannot be reasoned with. On Saturday, a supertyphoon is going to arrive here, after battering the Philippines earlier this week.

Noises off

Last night there was a proper thunderstorm. It started off quietly enough: walking back from the MTR I saw occasional flashes in the sky and distant rumbling, but it could easily have been mistaken for a flickering neon sign and somebody dropping their luggage.

Black rain

Two days ago a tropical storm swept in towards Hong Kong, and although it never reached us, this afternoon the rain came in and the Hong Kong observatory put up the black rain signal.

There's three levels of rain severity: yellow, which I don't like because it's redolent of golden showers, and I don't believe meterologists should be conflated with that sort of antic, red, which means if you're four years old you don't go to kindergarten, and black, which means impending doom, risk of flooding, drowning, and (apparently) the cue for everyone in Hong Kong to go to the cinema.

Trapped!!

After laughing at my intrepid removal men on Tuesday for being trapped in the lift, poetic justice caught up with me. Last night I got home to find the lift had broken down, so I had to walk 172 steps up to the front door of the apartment.  There had been two men working on the (intimidatingly old and worn-out looking) lift until late in the evening, so I assumed it would be working when I got in this morning.

Down the lift shuddered, to the first floor.  The doors came open, and I skipped down the stairs.  Only to see rain spraying in the back door, so I turned, and got right back in the lift, pressing the button to ascend.

Angry of Hong Kong

I was walking down Stanley Street, feeling a bit put out because there was a cooked dinner waiting for me at home, stopping me from going out and splurging on a burger and fries. Damn that quality homemade food! A man walking toward me suddenly turned and told the woman behind him to "get out my f---ing face".

Sore point

I woke up feeling like death today; a proper stinker of a hangover, and I didn't touch a drop of booze last night. Perhaps it's the cold weather, or my poor diet, or the dehydration caused by having the heater spurting out hot, dry air all night.