Being outdoors during a yellow typhoon alert in southeast Asia may sound exotic and exciting. Trust me - it isn't. As Typhoon Krosa's wind and rain turned Shanghai's Indian summer into something much more reminiscent of a summer in Dublin yesterday morning, many of the 200 Irish volunteers at the 2007 Special Olympics World Summer Games found themselves volunteering to stay indoors for the day.
The volunteer assigned to The Irish Times,however, was made of sterner stuff. "We planned to go to the athletics, didn't we?" Breege Fitzgerald produced a transparent raincoat from her bag and waved it nonchalantly. "So we might as well go to the stadium anyhow, and see what's happening."
At the transport desk in the hotel lobby, however, the news was grim. Chaotic traffic in the city centre, allied to a sudden and unprecedented shortage of taxis, had conspired to create delays of epic proportions to the shuttle bus arrangements.
"Ah, well," Breege sighed.
For a split second, The Irish Times had visions of a day spent dallying in the relative luxury of the Equatorial Hotel. A swim, perhaps? Or a spell in the sauna - if there is a sauna? A massage, even? But Breege was fastening her raincoat determinedly. "We'll just have to take the metro."
For anyone who's accredited to the Special Olympics World Summer Games, travel on the Shanghai metro is free. You simply wave your badge at the ticket office, whereupon Chinese railway employees dressed in Special Olympics outfits materialise out of nowhere and start opening locked gates and waving you through.
In practice - wary of the crowds, unfamiliar lines and potential for linguistic confusion - most people avoid the metro and take taxis, even on sunny days. But not Breege the brave.
We squelched to the Jing-An Temple underground station, and joined the throngs of commuters heading back to work after the week-long national holiday to celebrate the foundation of the People's Republic of China.
When we got to Shanghai Stadium, we found that it, too, was thronged. Hordes of gloomy athletes had been corralled into temporary holding areas, waiting for news. We saw Turks and Afghans and Poles and South Africans. We even spotted the team from Burma. There was no sign of the Irish contingent.
Gritting our teeth, we ventured back out into the rain and circled the stadium. Then we heard a raucous chorus of Show Me The Way To Go Home emanating from Stand 22. Bingo.
Following our ears, we found the 12 athletes of Team Ireland, aided and abetted by the usual array of youthful Chinese minders, conducting a full- blooded sing-song. Ian O'Donnell from Ballina, Co Mayo, was in particularly fine voice - with a smile to match.
"The holding area is too noisy. It's mayhem down there - so we moved up here," said Irish volunteer Judy Doran.
"It's quite cosy once you get in out of the wind. We're just waiting to find out when things are going to get going. We arrived for a 9.50am start. Then they said the races would begin at 11am. Now they've said it will be 1pm at the earliest."
For any athlete, this kind of open-ended delay is hard to handle; for athletes with intellectual disability, changes to their established routine can be especially upsetting. Yesterday's sudden drop in temperature - after a week of sunshine - also constituted a physical shock to the system. But still Team Ireland kept singing. They followed a blast of It's Raining Men with Yellow Submarine and, inevitably, Rihanna's Umbrella. Ella. Ella.
"If we don't win the race, we'll surely win the singing," declared Doran.
Outside, as the weather worsened, the tops of Shanghai's skyscrapers disappeared into a misty blur. By the time we battled our way back to the hotel the athletics had been cancelled for the day. This will cause problems tomorrow, no doubt, as competitions have to be curtailed to make up for lost time. But tomorrow, as the song says, is another day. Or is it a song? No. It's Gone With The Wind. Well, that figures.