In the night the howling wind woke me up. I look out and was wondering why it is raining the wrong way. The water was flying upwards. It seems that the wind was so strong that it was pushing the water upwards along the wall of the building. I saw all kinds of debris flying in the streets. Some houses seemed to have lost their roof and roof metal debris was flying in the street. I was just looking out of the window and even did not take any photos of the incident. Later we found out that several people had even died in Manila during that night because of that hurricane.
In the morning it was very cloudy and rainy. Elena went to the airport to meet Jeofre. He had recover from the eye infection properly.
The whole day it was very windy and cloudy so we were wondering if our flight can take off in the evening. The flight was scheduled 10pm. The husband of my sister-in-law brought us to the airport with his van. Almost all the streets were empty because of the hurricane.
We were early enough in the airport. It was lucky that we arrived early there because there was trouble with my wife's and son's passports. They both have Philippine passports and the newly renewed residence permit in their passport was written in Finnish and Swedish only (new EU style). So try to explain to the Philippine customs official that their status is permanent resident in Finland. The problem was that the officials thought that they were travelling as tourists and therefore they needed to pay the tourism tax. We tried to explain the matter for more than thirty minutes without any success. My wife and son had to pay the tourism tax (about 65 euros).
Our flight took off as scheduled because the center of the hurricane had already moved towards Hong Kong. The plane had to make a detour because of the hurricane. Therefore the flight time was 13 hours from Manila to Frankfurt. Flight Frankfurt to Manila was 11 hours when we travelled to Philippines a month earlier.