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