“There’s some dirty weather knocking about.”

This is a holiday weekend in Vietnam, the day having been invented a few years ago theoretically to commemorate some legendary Vietnamese kings, but really because the government decided that there weren’t enough public holidays. Sound. Unfortunately, the government didn’t decide the date of the holiday until a few days before, which meant that we couldn’t go away and actually do something.

So on Sunday morning we woke up and prepared ourselves for a lazy day of pottering about and tidying up.  It was British weather–cool and wet–so we opened the windows and the door, let the breeze breeze through, and emptied and washed the cats’ litter tray (n.b. foreshadowing).

Over the course of the day the breeze became increasingly breezy, until by dinnertime there was a constant howling.  The corridor outside our flat is open at both ends, so when the door was opened a crack (quite a task) the noise was spectacular.

The cats normally feel the need for the litterbox about nine o’ clock, so I hadn’t re-filled it yet.  It turns out, however, that howling gales can have an upsetting effect on a cat’s bowels, so we ended up with a bit of extra cleaning to do.

Worse was to follow.  The power going off was a minor hitch, because the building’s generator kicked in straight away.  The real problem was that like many things in this building, the windows were designed to look pretty, but with less emphasis on the practicalities of actually keeping water out.  Not only did the water start spurting between the windows and the frames, it started to come down from the flat above, where exactly the same thing was happening (we’re on floor 14 of 17).

We eventually contrived a system whereby the curtains soaked up the water and guided it down into our collection of buckets, pots and miscellaneous tubs, with gaps on the floor filled with towels:

Once one room’s receptacles were emptied, it was time to move on to the next one.  The cats steadily retreated as the waters advanced.

When we got round to sitting down and checking the weather forecast (Sunday: Thunderstorms; Monday; Thunderstorms; Tuesday: A Couple of Thunderstorms), we found out that this storm had a name: Tropical Storm Pakhar, a ‘pakhar’ being in Lao a kind of fish found in the lower Mekong.  It had been Typhoon Pakhar, the first of the 2012 season, but had weakened somewhat by the time it got here.

Here in all its glory:

And the track, which went more or less straight over our heads:

I tried the new Google Weather service, but it’s not working quite perfectly yet:

We got off lightly. A bit of mopping, a bit of scrubbing, and a bit of reassuring the cats, and we’re back to normal.  But when the lights went off and our generator started up, the village near our building stayed dark.  I don’t know what the windows (or roofs) are like there, but probably not better than ours.  And the construction workers who used to live in huts over the road no longer live in huts over the road, because the huts are no longer there.