How was it for you?

She sat up in bed and swept her unkempt hair off her face, still glistening and moist with euphoric perspiration. She leant over and languidly lit a cigarette, exhaling a smoky-blue haze of satisfaction. 

“Well, darling, how was it for you?” her eyes falling on his, “Did the earth move?”.

Too right it bloody did. At around 3pm on Saturday 26th March, an earthquake of around 4.7 magnitude struck the coast of Taiwan. Taipei city shook too, especially if you were in one of the rickety old buildings here. Some of the island's new arrivals may have also suffered temporary instability in their bowels.

I, like everyone else in Taiwan, survived unharmed. I was on the bus at the time. Unable to tell the difference between a seismic event and a particularly reckless driver, I rode the quake in blissful ignorance. I found out about it 30 minutes later, my personal tutor student told me as I arrived for our lesson at Taipei 101. She gleefully announced the building's ability to withstand an earthquake of up to 8.5 magnitude. I marked it on my mental map, in case Armageddon hits while I'm here.

My flatmate Jon, however, was back in our house of cards at the time, taking a nap. He unwittingly became part of a remake of The Exorcist bed-shaking scene – and, naturally, almost shit his pants. Never have I been more relieved to be doing battle with Taipei's bus network.

Yet a browse through the wildly popular Earthquake Today blog reports that there was another earthquake in Taiwan less than a week previously – registering 5.5. None of us even knew about this until I just found it on “The ET”.

So it seems, like a lot of things in life, when it comes to noticing earthquakes, it ain't where you're from, it's where you're at.