四川大地震 (The Great Earthquake of Sichuan)

One of significant damage to the apartment 

Okay... I'll start with a bit of story that has been told to me before arriving here, in Chengdu, Sichuan province. When we were asked which exchange partner university we want to be in, I chose Sichuan Normal University in Chengdu. There aren't many students wanna go there, because I heard that there was a big earthquake in Chengdu back in 2008. Point. I didn't hear about anything or ask about anything else. It was 2008, well in Indonesia, there is an earthquake several times almost each month in certain areas, I felt once in Bandung but it wasn't big. So then I said, "Well.. let's hope it won't be there when we're there."

Before yesterday I came home late from my friends's place and it was raining lightly when I went to bed at almost 3 am. In the morning I was awaken by a really big shaking on my bed, and I saw the curtain of my window shaking, also the door to the balcony. There are some building construction close to my apartment that every morning make a lot of noise followed by vibration on our apartment. For a minute I thought it was it, but then I said that this one isn't, it's surely way bigger. I went out of my apartment and saw some neighbors already ran to the stairs. For a second I saw the pool and it creeps me out when I saw the water made some medium wave due to the shaking. I ran down the stairs to the door of the building. It was stuck and can't be opened for almost a minute, but with the help of the neighbors we pushed hard and we succeeded to open this God damn door. A lady took a bike to hold the door opened. Then I was outside, waiting if there'll be the aftershocks, which is usually happened. Until today there are about hundreds aftershocks after the earthquake.

The door we stuck on

When I was outside, I saw a lot of people on the street, some in their cars and seemed like they wanted to go out of town. Big traffic on the road, and the small restaurants were full of crowd taking their breakfast. It was about 8.30 in the morning and since I got here, I never saw a lot of Chengdu people are out that early. When I got back to my apartment, I checked the news on internet, it was 7.0 of magnitude and the epicenter in a town called Ya An, still in the Sichuan province, about 100-ish km from Chengdu. They estimated the dead victims reached hundreds, thousand injured and that can still be increased. :(

The last big earthquake in Sichuan was in 2008, 8.0 magnitude and the estimation of dead victims was about 90.000 of people. The epicenter was back then about 80 km from Chengdu, and the dead victims in Chengdu city was about 80.000.
Hundreds to thousands aftershocks stated until two days after the first earthquake.

Traffic after the earthquake

Welcome to Chengdu

It's been almost a month and half I'm in Chengdu. It's one of biggest cities in China, located in the Sichuan province. I'm doing my exchange program for a semester in Sichuan Normal University in order to learn better my Mandarin lessons. Sichuan province is very famous for its spicy cuisine, for example for their Huo Guo or hotpot.

At first glance, Chengdu is full of pollution due to the building construction everywhere. Every local people I met always said that Chengdu is a promising city for an astonishing development in the future, maybe it can be another Shanghai in a few years. Chengdu is also very known to be the city where there are still pandas in the wild nature. At north part of Chengdu, there's a Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. Since their population is in a menace of the extinction, it is more and more encouraged to keep their existence preserved. Despite of the big population and the stronger its development gets, you wouldn't find foreigners as many as you can see in Shanghai. It is also not very frequent to meet local people who speak English. I had a little hard time finding my apartment and/or getting general information since I don't speak really well Mandarin.

For the transportation, Chengdu in full of public buses, subway and taxis. For buses, if you have the transportation card, you pay 1,80 CNY everytime you take it, and 2 CNY if you don't have the card. The card works for the subway too. The card costs for about 24 CNY and then you can charge it from 20 CNY. Chengdu for now only has two lines for its subway. The one which cross the west-east part of the city and another one from south to north. In every map of Chengdu, whether from the hostel or the tourist information center, all the streets and information are written in Chinese characters, so you better want to have sort of dictionary or Pleco application on your smartphone(Pleco is an apps that helps to recognize the Chinese characters or to translate). Not forgotten to mention, after a month and half, I never found a single bus route map, I started to think that they just don't have any(I'll update if turn out there's one). For cabs, in Chengdu there are these green color cabs that are more reliable than other ones. There are two types of green cabs, they really look similar but one has 8 CNY for their starting flag, and another one starts from 9 CNY. At night the starting flag rise up for 1 CNY more. The cabs drivers always speak Chinese, so if your Chinese isn't really good, just try to learn some sentences and pronounce the address really well, because it happened to me quite often that these drivers don't know the city very well so they have to ask their colleagues by phones.

Well, maybe that's all for the opening of my story in China. I'll try to keep it updated along the stay. Really hope to find more about this city, the province and the country.

BsxxxARS