Is one of Captain Haddock’s phrases in The Adventures of TinTin a 2011 film.

As Typhoon Saola’s progress was monitored we were called into the auditorium on Thursday afternoon and told that school would be closed and that Friday’s classes would be online.

Gone are the snow days. We live in the tropics now so they have definitely gone. Instead they have been replaced by Typhoon days. But the days when students and teachers looked forward to a day off to chill and drink (this has been mentioned more than once!) have gone. Teachers spent Thursday afternoon making sure everything was ready for online and at 8am on Friday everyone was online.

This could have been a triggering event for us all. The last time the Croziers went online was St Andrew’s Day 2022 because of a close contact. But that was then with boarding students. This is now. And going online because of a typhoon should have felt more serious but it didn’t. We all left school to go to our home. We just had ourselves to look after. And actually even if we had been in boarding – all the boarders got home.

The last time we had been sent home from school in China (pre-Covid) was in January 2018 – for a snow day. When we woke up, there wasn’t snow on the ground and I think at the time we wondered why on earth schools had been closed. By the afternoon though, there was snow.

Not much of it, but enough to close places down. For those people used to more snow, it was disappointing, though we did get to build a snowman (a small one).

It was a bit like that again waking up on Friday morning to a very calm sea.

The view had changed a bit in that some of the boat moorings and the boat in the middle had been reconfigured. There were no boats in the distance and I read somewhere that over 1000 boats had been recalled to harbours and the fishermen relocated inland.

As Friday went on, so did online learning. Classes were shortened to allow for time away from the screen and we all had lunch together. Something that hadn’t happened previously because the schools had different timetables from one another.

The day ended, the whiskey and gin and rosé wine were opened. The rain had started about 1pm when I took the rubbish out, but it wasn’t significant. Messages were sent out that the metro would close at 7pm and businesses were to shut at 4pm and the airport had shut at midday. Photos and videos were posted on social media of queues at the metro. We were thankful we weren’t trying to make it home from school.

At 6am Friday morning the strength of the typhoon was upgraded from yellow to orange. At 2pm it was upgraded further to red on China’s five tier typhoon warning system. Apparently only the second time in five years for this top tier warning to be used. The last was in 2018 Months for Typhoon Mangkhut. It is one that we remember as we saw the social media posts at the time from people in Zhuhai just down the coast from Shenzhen.

This is just down the coast from us, maybe a 15 minute walk. The boardwalk which we can access directly from our compound was closed up and you can see why. The sea level had risen during the day.

As night fell, so did the rain. Earlier in the day we had brought our furniture in from the balcony. After a home cooked meal, the wind started to pick up too, and I followed some handy typhoon tips of closing curtains just in case windows blew in.

We went to sleep and slept well – that is until just after 4am when the hook holding up my dressing gown on the back of the door fell off and woke Martin up. Completely unrelated to the typhoon. A quick check of the apartment was done, and apart from a leak on one of the windows, everything was intact. I went back to bed and slept. Martin was awake and didn’t get back to sleep. The wind had died down, though there were still ripples on the water.

We have now woken up properly and know that Hong Kong has had a lot more damage than us in Shenzhen. Or at the least the part that we are in seems to have suffered minimal damage. At 8:15am the typhoon was downgraded with the metro being able to resume at 8:40am and the airport reopening at 8:30am.

Six of the photos below were taken by my colleague and he has allowed me to post these as he was up for a walk this morning.

Another colleague who was awake at 2am said that workers were out removing fallen trees from the road and it also appears that there were emergency shelters put up by school for the workers.

The rain is still falling at midday. Apparently on one of my weather apps it will stop at 8pm. Only time will tell.

But for the meantime – we have survived our first typhoon. And for those wondering – saola is a Vietnamese/Laos critically endangered bovine. And is also called an Asian Unicorn. (Thanks Wikipedia)

Postscript at 1:15pm. Hardly raining and my wellies are overkill.