Terremoto

Well here's a first... I was in an earthquake. It hit Chincha Alta, which is just 35 km north of the city we visited on Saturday, and probably ~50km away from where we stayed Saturday night (Lima is 125 miles/200km away to give you an idea of how strong it was). There was a devastating earthquake in that region in 2007, and the infrastructure of some cities still hasn't recovered (evident by the fact we had to walk to our bus station yesterday because some of the roads are still being rebuilt). As far as I can tell, no one was hurt today... it was a 5.4 or 4.9 on the Richter Scale (I say "or" because different articles are reporting different numbers). All the news results are in Spanish and pretty short since it just happened at 8:04am, so we'll see as time goes on what the news says.

Basically, at 8:03am I was sleeping (I'm no fool)... then at 8:04am I woke up. In my haze I was thinking "who the heck is shaking the bed"... and it kept shaking, and shaking, and shaking. It wasn't violent or anything, just felt like someone was pushing on the side... a lot. After a few seconds, I thought "holy crap, this is an earthquake." None of the curtains or plants or anything else were shaking though, so I thought that was kind of odd, but I just stayed in bed for the 20-30 seconds it lasted. Immediately after it stopped, I grapped my computer to get on the U.S. Geological Survey website to see if it had in fact recorded an earthquake. For about 20 min, nothing was coming up on the computer (they have it coded with quakes in the last hour, day, and week). I thought "okay, maybe I am crazy... maybe just the construction going on around the building shook the bed, or I ate a crazy Peruvian herb that makes me hallucinate." Either way, I reported on the site under the "You felt it?" section (hey, it's not like I get this chance often...) then, around 8:40am it popped up "5.4 in Chincha Alta." I was proud of myself of diagnosing the trembles an earthquake (I guess because there have been some in DFW lately and we learned about the one in Ica yesterday, so they're just on my mind). I looked down on the street and no one seemed to notice- Jason was at work and said he didn't feel anything... so I guess I can just thank the shoddy bed we have for picking up vibrations that were 125 miles away.

I really hope everyone is okay down towards Ica, but it is kind of cool I got to experience my first earthquake down here. With my luck, there will probably be the very first tornado ever at Machu Picchu on Thursday... we'll just have to wait and see. I'll post about the weekend in a few hours; got to get to my cereal and TV watching to prep my mind. :)