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My time in China has provided me with a lot of new experiences, but today's I am very thankful was not a harmful one. I'm not sure if this made the six o'clock news, but I have found news reports online verifying that all of us here in Beijing are not crazy. Apparently several minutes before noon today, we experienced an earthquake that registered a 5.1 on the richter scale. I had never been through an earthquake, so at the time I wasn't really sure what was going on. But I could tell by the look on all the girls' faces in the office that I wasn't the only one who felt it. Since I was sitting at my desk on the 25th floor, it felt for a couple of moments like I was in a treehouse and there were strong winds making the treehouse sway from side to side. At first I thought someone had moved something heavy, like a desk, across the floor, but then I think it hit everyone at once that it was an earthquake and we soon decided to get up from our desks and go towards the stairs. Fortunately the building only swayed back and forth once and that was it. But since it was lunch time, I think almost everyone took a break to get off the 25th floor of the building and feel the ground underneath their feet. So Linda and I went to lunch at a little restaurant down the street, instead of the usual office cafeteria several levels underground. She ordered for me a bowl of noodles. I really struggled using chopsticks on them and the quantities here are always so big. I can never finish a meal, I always feel so guilty when I have to leave 2/3 of the meal there.
In response to Carla's dilemma with the names, I will try to straighten the whole concept out. Ok, to start out with, Kitty is an English name she chose. I don't even know her Chinese name. Pretty much everyone in my office has an English name so that he/she can have a name that is easier to pronounce for foreigners, since the firm deals with a lot of foreigners. The English names they have are all chosen, either by themselves or their friends, they are not names they were given at birth. Now Kitty was just saying one day at lunch that she thought she wanted a new English name, she was tired of the name Kitty. While I, for fun, gave her the name Cathy, it would be a chore to change her name to Cathy because her email address would need to be changed and all of her business correspondents would have to be notified of her name change, etc. Hope this helps!
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Otto
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Quaker
Just now getting your web log. Very exciting stuff. Learn your crisis language ("help me get this piano of my foot" "which way to the stairs 25 stories to the street level" "Knock three times if you can hear me") if you are going to live on a fault line. Good luck and learn lots. Otto