Smooth Ride, May 16 2006

The season’s first typhoon - Caloy - just left Laguna leaving a body count of 23 and rising. On our behalf it meant brownout (that would be blackout to the rest of the English speaking world) for 36 hours. Less than 100 kilometres away 5000 families were displaced. A couple of hundred people die every year from typhoons, floods and landslides in the Philippines.

The war stories from our neighbourhood would be something like:
“There were leaves everywhere, man. They just came right off the trees. Some of our plastic garden chairs even fell over.”
“The power was gone for so long we had to eat all our ice cream….”
“It was so cold I had to turn off the aircon in my car…”

The worst trauma was the kids anger when the TV broke down right in a Thomas and Friends episode.

/J.