In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, just 12 hours after donning a white chef's uniform to promote a public Moon Festival barbecue down at city hall, Mayor Ma Ying-jeou was decked out in jeans and sneakers, work shirt and white hard hat, visiting the scene of the Sungshan Hotel collapse on Pateh East Road. Surrounded by TV camera crews and reporters with microphones and notebooks, the mayor alternately spoke into a mobile phone, communicating with disaster relief workers around the city, and answered hurried questions from the press. 3am, 3:30am, 4am. The mayor never sleeps.
Earthquake stories: Part I
Everyone experienced the earthquake yesterday morning in different ways. Maybe you were sleeping and suddenly woke up. Maybe you were out with friends. Maybe you were standing on your veranda, taking in the magnificent nightview. We'd like to hear from readers across the island -- where were you? what happened? what were you thinking? how do you feel today? [Send in your reports by e-mail to offthebeat@taipeitimes.com]
Here's our first story, from a US national working in Taipei:
"I live near Shihta University in an eighth floor rooftop apartment. The earthquake was the most intense mortal experience I've ever had. As things dropped and fell all over the apartment, I walked outside to my rooftop porch to observe all the buildings in my neighborhood swinging and shaking. Images of being crushed under falling debris flashed through my mind. The fact that our lives could be plucked away in a moment, and that everything we've ever worked for, or believed in, or tried to become, would be finished, tore through my consciousness, as it must have done for millions of victims of natural disasters for millennias.
"Visions of Turkey's recent earthquake flashed through my mind: how abstract it all seemed last month just looking at the news footage and reading the papers, and how real it had now become for me as I stood on my roof watching the city swaying over the undulating earth, helpless to do anything except contemplate the most important thing to every living creature -- my life and its mortality.
"Today, as I write this, I'm a different person than I was yesterday. I no longer take life for granted. My life was almost snatched away. And it could happen again at any moment. I was lucky. We were lucky."
E-mail earthquake stories to
offthebeat@taipeitimes.com
RSS