Mourning

Everyone's in mourning over the earthquake today. In three of my classes we spent the majority of the time talking about it; teaching vocab on it, trying to discuss it. One of the students I talked to had obviously been spending a lot of time watching TV about it because she was able to tell me all of these stories. She told me about 3 people who were saved or escaped. One was a 12 year old girl. During the earthquake her parents died in the fall of their home and part of the building fell on her leg trapping her inside the home. But instead of giving up she decided that she wanted to get out and go on with her life so she found a piece of glass and cut her leg off before escaping out of the home. My student also told me that the rescuers spend around 30 hours to rescue one person. So they are working very slowly, sometimes too slowly but they have no other choice. If they work faster or if there are too many people the buildings could just fall and crush the remainding people. My student told me about a 61 year old who escaped in good health and about a 57 year old man who lived for the 6 days (before being rescued) drinking his own pee and eating paper that he could get to (for there was nothing else around to get to). He also escaped with hardly a problem, only a slight skin problem which was easily resolved. Today at 2:28 there was 3 minutes of silence where all of the work stopped in town, all of the vehicles stopped to honk their horns and all of the sirens in the city went off. I was at work in class and hardly knew what was going on at first as an announcement came on (which never happens at work) in Chinese, I was only teaching one student and when she got up and crossed herself I knew there was nothing I could do but at least respect her and stand up in silence myself. I knew it must have something to do with the earthquake after all it's the only thing that's been on the news for the past couple of days. Throughout China those three minutes were absolutely the same and they were played over and over again throughout the day and into the night as throughout the country people cried in mourning for the earthquake victims. Tonight my friends called to invite me to a donation party at one of the bars. We tried to go but it was absolutely packed to the brim so we didn't get to go in. My friend told me that she had invited a friend of hers who works for the radio station but her friend had refused to go saying that her boss had given them three days off (as the government is taking control of the radio stations to broadcast news on Sichuan). And while giving these three days off her boss had told them they weren't allowed to go out and have fun as they were to go home and reflect on the awful disaster. Every company and city in China is competing to contribute the most money to the rescuers and every day different numbers of victims and of money donated are broadcast. The TV channel that we have here at home has done nothing at all but continuously broadcast about the event, I think that almost everything said about the issue and every person saved has been broadcast to China. It seems that the country isn't to go on with their work but is to sit in mourning. In the meantime my friend told me that the 3 Gorges Dam is under huge threat of overflowing (which would mean the destruction of at least one huge city of Chongqing - about 34 million people). She told me that the city isn't being evacuated but that there are experts being flown in to examine the dam and make sure that the after shocks from the earthquake won't make the dam overflow or break. I can't even imagine how this country would react if that were to happen.

On a different note I've seen a boom over the past couple weeks, of cars. There are more cars here every day I stay. I've never seen such a boom, every day the mall has more and more "parking spaces" on the sidewalks and streetsides around it, aside from the full parking lot and parking spaces. Every day I see more traffic and it takes me longer to get home. It seems like a strange thing to experience but there truly is a car boom going on these days in China.