This morning I woke up to what I thought was really really loud annoying construction workers. But I realized pretty quickly that the entire house was shaking and this wasn't construction. I literally jumped out of my bed and ran out to the patio until it ended. I feel like it all happened in slow motion, but the entire thing probably lasted 30 seconds, if that. It turns out it was a "tremor" that was a 6.2 on the Richter scale where we were. An earthquake is anything that reaches a 7.0. So it wasn't an official earthquake, but it was definitely scary and I'm pretty sure I was shaking harder than the ground was by the end of it. My family was totally relaxed about it because it happens all the time here. But it was definitely different from anything I'd ever experienced before. it was jsut so weird when the ground you're standing on starts moving and you can't do anything about it. A couple things fell off my shelves, but nothing really got damaged. My friends and I were all talking about it today and the consensus is that most people were glad it happened because now we'll be more prepared if there's a more serious earthquake, and it's part of the whole Chilean experience!
Is is bad that as soon as the tremor ended I was like, "ooh this will be awesome to add to my blog!"...? I guess it just means I'm really into blogging now... :-)
NY Times Article
Hey Han, yep, def good for a blog post, that 'tremor'... reminds me of my first quake... I was in or just out of grad school and was camping in the Adirondacks for a long weekend... our first night there (really early morning) the ground shook pretty hard... I'd been a little concerned about bears, and woke up thinking at first that a bear was shaking the tent(!) When we hiked out later we heard all about it from the proprietor of a local diner, who had a huge mess to clean up - piles of broken dishes and glasses all over the floor... Stay safe!
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