so i'm sitting on my roommate's pc, going through some last minute prep for my exam today when suddenly the monitor started shaking lightly. my first thoughts we, "oh god! there really is a ghost living in this hostel" (details about this later). a few seconds later i realized that i was indeed feeling a - by now - pretty strong earthquake. by this time my roommate had woken up so the two of us stood up and stood right under the door, as taught to us by our parents (i just found out thats NOT what you're supposed to do) and pretty soon the entire corridor was filled with people. a few minutes passed, and everything was quite again so we all came back to our rooms and i decided to look up tips on earthquake safety on the internet. random? read on!

so another five minutes pass, and then i feel more shocks. much lighter than the first time but still worrying. so me and salma (who lives across from me) decide we should all vacate the hostel. we start waking people up, and can you imagine that people had actually fallen in just five minutes! and to make things weirder, they refused to leave the building, saying they'd felt much worse! so i grabbed my exam notes, keys and cell and went outside and talked to some other hostelites who had decided to leave the rooms as well. after about fifteen minutes of "where were you when it happened?" and "what did you do?" i decided to come back to the room.

then i went to the common room, where we have the hostel tv, and put on the news. amazingly, the local news had already picked up on the story and were getting interviews of people who had come out on the streets. it's being said the earthquake measured 6.7 on the richter scale which is pretty bad. apparently the epicentre is somewhere near gilgit in the north and the shocks travelled all the way to karachi in the south and then came back, which is why we had a five minute gap between shocks. there have been reports of houses falling down but i haven't heard any confirmed news yet.

anyway, that was my saturday morning. wonder what the rest of the weekends going to be like.