My brain is full of far too many things!



Living through a major earthquake is a strange experience. On one level, I feel like my rights to be shell-shocked or panicked or something are denied, because while you've all probably seen the pictures on the news about Christchurch that look something like this...


and


Or anything from this website. On the contrary, my street looks like this:





Yeah. Not really disaster-zone, right? Despite all the drama and what the TV wants you to think, 90% of Christchurch is unharmed by the quake. It's actually quite a startling experience to be driving down a perfectly normal street and all of a sudden there's a huge pile of rubble that used to be a building. Otherwise most of the city is completely normal. NZ has amazing building laws, because we're on a faultline, and mostly only really old stone and brick buildings were damaged. The sad thing is that most of those older buildings were in the central city, which is in pretty bad shape. Still, a lot of heritage-buildings had been retro-fitted with shock-prevention so some of our historic buildings are still standing.

Anyway, my experience of a 7.1 was waking up at 4:35am, sitting up in bed and staring at my desk thinking, 'How the hell are we both going to fit under there?' Meanwhile the Boyfriend was already up and in the doorway, wondering where I was.

Once I was in the doorway, clinging to him and watching my flatmates stumble out of their rooms, waiting for the shaking to stop, well, there wasn't much going on in my head, to be honest. I just kept thinking he needed to put some pants on. -_-;;; We hung out there for a while, the aftershocks kept coming. We realised there was no power pretty fast, and it's surprising how quickly your panic levels go up when you have no power, and no torches. My flatmates had some torches though, so that was okay. One flatmate had not appeared in his door, so we called out to him and he yelled back from his room that a bookcase had fallen on him. (I'm a horrible person, and found this immensely funny at the time.) He was fine, it just took him a while to get out of his room.

At this point the barrage of texting started. YAY FOR MOBILE PHONES! And even more yay for cellphone towers having back-up generators. After I had ascertained my immediate friends and family were okay, we started cleaning up the more dangerous mess like broken ceramic on the bedroom floor, and putting things back where they belong. My lovely new computer's screen was about two inches from falling off the edge of the desk. Phew. We went outside to see if everything was okay, and see if I could find my cat. There were a couple of people out on the street and everything seemed mostly alright. I know some people who actually went back to bed at this point, -__- because they figured it was no big deal, but even without any method of communication from authorities we knew that, um, the POWER being out generally equals a serious problem. (sigh)

We setup in the lounge with a candle going (with a nice fat base that wasn't going to fall over) with some blankets and waited for the sun to rise. By this stage everyone had aquired clothes, which was a relief, especially in the case of my 55 year old large overweight flatmate who sleeps naked. @_@

At some point I remembered that mp3 players have radios, so I bolted off to find mine, and we listened to National Radio telling us that hey, actually, things were WAY worse than we thought. Power out everywhere, sewage pipes busted, central city in ruins, army on the way, silt spilling out of the ground in the outer suburbs up to over a metre high, don't use the cellphones the networks are overloading. Yeah. So. We just stayed put.

By 7 the sun was up and the aftershocks had decreased to a managable level, so me and BF decided to go back to bed. At this point, all the people in OTHER cities were waking up, and all decided to text or call us, which I wasn't very impressed with. This included my dad who had heard, 'there was an earthquake in Christchurch, and now the weather' and seemed to think it was all a bit of a joke. I told him to get off the cellphone network and change his radio station because it was a DISASTER, actually. Idiot.


Anyway, very long story shorter, my cat came back eventually,


ISN'T SHE SO CUTE? I HAD TO RESIST POSTING ABOUT ELEVENTY BILLION PHOTOS OF HER I AM SO HAPPY SHE IS OKAY!

so did the power, everyone I know is okay, and this has been a VERY strange experience. Meanwhile I was going to rant about life being crazy at the moment, but I have already spend valuable essay-writing time on this entry (read: justifiable procrastination), so I best be off. Thanks for the people that commented on my 'I'm alive!' post. :) I shall continue to live, if in a slightly deranged form, as usual.


Love love!