Saturday, October 18, 2008

My First Earthquake

Put that way, it sounds like a children's book. But a scary one! No, just kidding, it wasn't scary. It was just weird, having never before experienced the sensation of the earth shaking. What was weirder, though, is that no one around me (I was sitting with 3-4 people) acknowledged what was going on, they all just kept on chatting like everything was normal (I wanted to shout, "PEOPLE, EVERYTHING'S SHAKING!" but I kept my cool, a.u.). Then after a minute (or maybe after one of them saw my face), one person said, "it's an earthquake," and I said, "huh." (Interestingly, in Spanish a small earthquake is called a temblor, and a large one a terremoto. I tried to explain that English has just one word, and it didn't depend on the magnitude of the shaking. They were perplexed by this.) It lasted for what felt like a while, but was maybe only a minute or so. According to reuters (so it must be true) it was a magnitude 6.1 quake off the Pacific coast. The fun never stops down here...

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