Chile, Day 12: Tremblor

So I was having my breakfast this morning, in the hotel's 'complimentary breakfast' area and all around people were stirring their tea, popping bread into the toasters, the low-key conversation of people waking up, when all of a sudden there was a rumble and the room started to shake. Everybody froze in place. The rumbling increased for a few seconds, then subsided. After 5 or 6 seconds it stopped; everybody exchanged nervous little smiles, and the morning continued as it had been.

The earth shakes in Chile a lot. I had wondered about that, but when I had asked Franco last week if Chile got a lot of earthquakes, he said, "No, not really..." But the fact is that Chile gets so much of this kind of thing that they don't even bother to call it an 'earthquake' (terremoto) until it hits at least 5 on the Richter scale. Anything less than that is just a 'tremor' (tremblor).

We were talking about it on the ride into work this morning. One of the women said, "You could tell there was going to be a tremor. We had that big rain, remember? Then 2 warm days. The tremors always follow that pattern." There is a lot of culture around earthquakes, both folklore and fact. Dogs will bark furiously just before an earthquake (maybe one more reason why the dogs are so tolerated). Copiapo suffered a huge earthquake back in the 1920's (?) which virtually flattened the town. The Matta house was one of the few larger homes that was left standing; that's why it's used as the regional museum now. In my hotel information brochure, the very first note under 'in case of emergency' is all about earthquakes. It is translated (badly) into English: 'locate you in a safe place, for example under a solid furniture.'

But the rest of the morning was tremor-free and now I am back at the hotel for lunch.

Oops, look at the time! I've got to get back to work. More later.