6.9… What?

At 1:30 this morning I woke to a rather loud banging sound coming from over my head and I looked around groggily in the dark to hit whoever was shaking my bed. It took me a few seconds to realize that the sound was actually the banging of wooden doors on the wall used for decoration. My bed was sliding back and forth and the chandelier overhead was swaying in time with the sound of the doors. Earthquake! When we were in Taiwan and an earthquake hit, I never knew whether to panic and run outside or wait it out to see if it was the ‘big one’.   I ran downstairs and found Marty still awake, Pilar heading to the bathroom, and Carmela following me. Carmela and I decided to go out to the courtyard and stand in the open. When the plants finally stopped swinging back and forth, we decided it was OK to go back to bed. I waited for the boys to emerge from their section of the house, but that never happened. There were a few aftershocks about 30 minutes later, but I finally was able to fall back to sleep around 2:30. This morning when the boys stumbled into the kitchen our conversation went something like this…

“What did you think about the earthquake?”

“What???? There was an earthquake and we missed it?”

“Yes, a 6.9 magnitude earthquake.”

“Aw man, my first earthquake and I slept through it. I hope it happens again.”

Um, no thank you.

Luckily it happened a few hundred miles away on the Guatemalan/Mexico border and there was only one injury and a slew of mudslides. Phew!

We spent our class time today at a local coffee farm and Mayan cultural museum. We learned all about the fascinating process of how coffee is made and other interesting tidbits of history and culture about the Maya. The plants on the farm were amazing and we walked out of there on a caffeine high. Good times!