Ramadhan with a shock

As usual, the Ramadhan fever shocks almost everyone of us. Our stomach feels the shock with the less foods thrown into it in the days. Instead, it has to reschedule its working hours to night time with lots and lots of food thrown in during and after buka puasa time and lots of foods were thrown in the dumpsters too. Even most mosques (if they were alive) will feel shock as suddenly they were flocked with lots and lots of people topping up their amalan during this fasting month.

Not just that, my kitchen, pots and pans and gas are also feeling the Ramadhan fever as in these two days of Ramadhan I've been utilizing them more than I've used them in the past year (excuse me, not in the day time ok...).

But, as we only feel minor shocks going into Ramadhan, a bigger shock was felt on the eve of Ramadhan as we prepare for our first terawih. An earthquake, measuring 8.4 on the Richter scale, struck our neighbor, 155km southwest of Bengkulu at around 7.10pm. It was then followed by a series of powerful aftershocks.

News said the undersea tremor could also be felt in Jakarta, 600km away and also caused high-rises to sway in neighboring Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Tsunami warnings were issued as far away as Africa but were lifted several hours later.

My early response was to sms Adi and Nina in Jakarta, wishing them well. Adi responded about one hour later saying that he didn't know about it huh? dasar! hahaha but, he's safe anyway. I didn't get any respond from Nina until yesterday when she told me that her sms didn't go through that night and she's also safe.

On the first day of fasting, more aftershocks felt, the strongest being 7.8 at around 7.50am and felt in tall buildings around KL. I was just arrived in office when announcement after announcement were made telling us to be alert and finally we were asked to evacuate the building at around 8am.

It wasn't like something really emergency as everyone was taking his or her sweet time to walk down the stairs, some even wait to take the elevator. Even the entrance to the office, which supposed to deactivate in the event of emergency, still requires a touch of access card to open. Crazy! And I still have time to grab my camera! lol... and my colleague after going two floors down was still contemplating to go up to get his laptop :-) which he didn't.

We were told to leave the building compound to a place 200-meter away and I got a nice spot up a small hill and managed to capture few pictures of people mingling with each others. And to a surprise, I've never seen pretty girls more than in the past year on that morning! Maybe, they were hiding behind their office partitions before this or was it me who was hiding?!

Anyway, the building wass cleared off any damage by the fire department and we were sent back to office after about one-hour later and there was announcement telling us to continue working. Duhhh!!!

So, if you think you had a disastrous fasting with no foods, water, cigarettes (in daytime), think about our friends in Indonesia, they have no shelters to celebrate Ramadhan. Luckily (compared to 2004 tsunami that hit Acheh), so far only 14 were reportedly died. And let's pray for them.