I was down on Cuba Street in Wellington Friday afternoon for an appointment at the eye doctor's' (yeah, I need a new pair of glasses... sigh) when the building began moving.
Someone yelled "Get away from the windows!" and the lady helping me choose a pair of frames for my new glasses gripped the edge of the small table we were sitting at.
A few seconds later the building stopped shaking and she asked me if I was all right.
"I'm fine," I said and we went back to choosing those frames.
Earthquakes are news in New Zealand - at least on television - but most people on Cuba Street didn't seem to pay much attention to this one. In the bars and restaurants up and down the street people kept drinking beer or coffee - depending, I guess, on how difficult the day had been up to that point - and two guys sitting on a bench nearby passed a joint back and forth (apparently, on Cuba Street, smoking dope in public is not frowned upon the way it is in some places.)
Bureaucrats, of course, took a slightly more heightened view of the 'quake. They shut down the railroads and the airport was closed for a bit. Hundreds of men and women in brightly colored vests and hardhats fanned out across the city checking for structural damage but no one seemed to be in a state of panic.
Some people were seriously inconvenienced, however. All those commuters who had ridden the trains to get to their jobs in the city Friday morning were left stranded. So many of them called home at the same time to ask husbands, wives and domestic partners to come get them that the cell phone system became overloaded and - if I understand this technology, which I don't - apparently crashed for a little while.
No worries, people just started texting... at least I think they did... a reporter on television said that's what she did... I spent a minute, maybe two, trying to figure out how if the cellphone system had crashed you could still text but then gave up because, as I said, I don't really understand that technology at all...
Anyway, a lot of people did not call or text. Instead, they fashioned cardboard and paper signs with the names of the communities they were trying to get to printed on them and just stood on corners. In some parts of Miami or LA that could get you shot. In Wellington, people stopped and gave them a ride with no questions asked.
Kinda amazing, when you think about it.
For the record, Friday's earthquake was the strongest one to ever hit Wellington... the last one was 6.5 on the Richter scale and this one was 6.7. I don't know how much more serious that made it because, well, I don't understand earthquake technology either. They do seem to be getting more intense, however. The first one we went through was 5.6 on the scale.
Just another day in The Land Down Under and Over a Bit...
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