Earthquake Diary 35

I forgot to mention in the last post that we have been having very strong aftershocks after dinner each night. Just about the time that I go into a room to meditate everything starts shaking. They seem fairly mild but that is only relative to the big one we had. These would have been a really big deal a month ago. Even now they are causing more damage, especially in the weakened buildings.

 This picture shows a police car waiting in line with everyone else to get gas. At the end of the line there is a man holding a sign that says the gas is only for working vehicles and that they will not serve private cars. When we reached the station itself, we found that there were two policemen there to insure that people followed the rules.

 The man is just finishing sweeping the parking lot of the local Kentucky Fried Chicken, which opened beginning the next day for a specific and limited number of customers a day. They gave our slips of paper with numbers on them.

 This was nice - a plum tree that was in blossom. It means that spring is almost here. It was actually a good thing that the big quake came during cold weather. It meant that there was no problem with food spoilage as there would have been if it were summer.

 This building is on the riverside near my apartment. On the outside it looks fine, but my wife and I talked to a women who lives here. She said that inside many walls were cracked and it was going to be very costly to repair all the damage. This reminds me that we heard today that the official inspectors came and looked at our building yesterday. There are no structural problems and the only damage is around the outside where the ground sunk. This can be repaired gradually or in many cases just left the way it is.

 This is a few buildings down from the last picture. You can see my building in the background on the right. This building also looks okay on the outside but the inside shook so much that everything in the apartments was destroyed. We have acquaintances who live here and they said that all fragile items had broken and that everything else was covered with shards. In other words, they lost everything they had.

 This is a new store that opened on the main road near our apartment. It is basically a vegetable store although they have some other stuff. My wife checked it out and said that she will use it regularly from now on.

 This is Mr Donuts with a short line waiting to buy a donuts. Everywhere you go around the area, you can see people carrying boxes from this place. They must be making a fortune.

Speaking of fast food, here is Kentucky Fried Chicken after they opened.