Erdbeben

I wanted to tell you today about this last weekend I spent in Hualien, but I guess plans are made to skip hem. The reason is that I have experienced my first earthquake.

I had often been told at home about one time when we were in Tauste (my father's hometown) and how they had felt a small earthquake that had happened around Granada. I was already born, but I was less than two years old. So, I don't remember it. Some earthquakes have been felt in Barcelona, but I never did or I was away, as the time when people of the Astronomy Department noticed one when I was in London. Being already in Taiwan, I was told that some people had noticed something when this last big earthquake in China, but I didn't.

I finally did yesterday. I had just arrived home around 0:45am, after catching the last MRT from Taipei Central Station to home. It was round 1am, I was unpacking and writing something in my laptop for today, when I noticed a considerable tremor and the floor slightly swinging, as if I was in a boat, and the window glasses where tinkling. I thought for a second, "what a big truck is going by", until I realized that it wasn't any truck, everthing was moving by another cause.

I didn't really got scared, but I tried to remember in the following five or six seconds what I should do in a situation like this: just run, stand under the doorframe, go to the staircase?. When I was about to open the door of my apartment, it all stopped. I couldn't hear any sound, not in my staircase nor outside —it was very late, people sleep and are used to it— and I doubted for a while if it was real or not. But it had happened. I saw in a web page of the Central Weather Bureau of Taiwan this morning that it reached magnitude 6.0 and it happened at 17,5 km Est of Taipei. Just here.

I felat uneasy for a little while, I guess it's normal, and feeling as if I had been on a trip in a boat. And it didn't last longer than 10 seconds!.