Hope you enjoy.
Nature interrupted my day about 2:30 in the afternoon on Monday. The center of the initial quake was a few hundred miles to the southwest, but it rocked us pretty good here in Xi'an. My six-story office building shook and rumbled. I looked around at some co-workers and said that I thought that must have been an earthquake. After a few moments people started to get up and quickly move toward the exits. Hmmm, I thought, I guess that's a good idea . I had the presence of mind to grab my eye glasses and my wallet and followed everyone toward the nearest stairway. I started feeling strange, light-headed and dizzy, like I was drunk. Then I realized that it was because the building was swaying gently, mostly side-to-side. Some people were beginning to get really scared and I also felt a tinge of fear surge through my body, as it was taking a while to get down the stairs. We all made it outside and moved away from the building, but the drunken feeling persisted. You could not see the earth moving but there was enough rotary horizontal motion that it took effort to remain standing. This lasted for a total of approximately 5 minutes.
Management didn't want us to return to the building, so after a couple of hours of standing around outside, I rode my motorcycle home. The apartment I live in is new and the earthquake obviously helped the building "settle". There was what appears to be some minor exterior damage to the facade and some cracks in the walls. I inspected the inside of my apartment and found a total of 4 cracks in the plaster of three of the walls. I have a 3-globed hanging lamp over my dining room table. The horizontal movement was sufficient to get the lamps swinging so much that they smashed into each other and broke, littering the table and floor with broken glass.
Everything seemed safe, so I just spent a normal evening at home (many Chinese people spent the night outside in the park). During the night I was awakened by the sensation of being shaken. I looked around and listened, but finally concluded that I must have been dreaming. Tuesday morning at work my colleagues informed me that it was an aftershock. So, it seems that we were lucky here in Xi'an, in that the city did not suffer any appreciable damage to the infrastructure (roads, gas, water, or electricity). Mild aftershocks have continued (causing us to evacuate the office building again on Tuesday) but it appears that I have survived my first earthquake. Yesterday I heard, however, that the death toll in Xi'an was 82 people. Most likely they were killed when unreinforced brick buildings collapsed. Most Chinese people are still sleeping outside in the parks at night. Fortunately, the weather here is dry and mild, unlike Chengdu which is getting rain.
I have been tracking the aftershocks on some web pages. The most disturbing thing for us here in Xi'an was that with each aftershock the epicenter seemed to be moving closer to Xi'an. Obviously, the fault line from Chengdu leads directly toward us . We haven't felt any aftershocks lately so life is returning to normal now.