ohb

i feel the earth move...under my feet

It rained last night in Irkutsk, apparently the first rain of the year. The rain here is very obedient, it comes at night and lashes at your window with that soothing sound, as you sit smugly in the warmth and heat. Though last night I have to admit I was a wee bit scared. the wind started first, a rattling, wrenching, yanking kind of wind which I was sure was going to tear trees from their roots all round. The reason my imagination was running away with itself was that last weekend Volodya(1) freaked me out with warnings of a predicted earthquake. It was supposed to be an 8 on the Richter scale. It all started last Saturday, though of course that is not strictly true, I had heard rumours of it before then, and was later informed that we did in fact have an earthquake while Mom and I were in Mongolia -perhaps it was just our plane landing, with all Mom's shopping.
Anyway, Volodya told me that his mom had slept in her clothes with her documents under her pillow the night before, I was like, that's great news Volodya, very reassuring. After receiving bungled advice from loads of people on what to do, varying from the obscure to the seemingly sensible, I managed to construct a vague outline of what to do, basically, wait and when it seems to have stopped go outside. That's a sentence filled with hope and mangled reason. The suggestions included the following amongst others and left me with images of whole families perched on the toilet bowl indefinitely. -Get under a table, but only if its a good table, if its not go into the bathroom, but keep away from the pipes, better still if you have a separate toilet go in there, but those pipes might burst too, look for a capital wall (I now know what this is) and stand there, -apparently door ways are a good place to be, though I'm unsure if that's for the view of the other floors collapsing or just a suggestion for foreigners.

posted by orlagh @ 2:40 pm