On the mobile phone, as usually happens in these circumstances, no alarm was received and the earthquake, at 8 this morning in Taiwan, arrived suddenly. The Sardinian restaurateur Pino Rascini, 67 years old and originally from Osilo, was at home. He has lived in the Asian country for 10 years and opened his own restaurant for 6 years where he offers traditional Sardinian dishes such as culurgionis, fregula and filindeu.
«We were still in bed – he says -, we had just woken up and the earthquake found us like this. My wife told me to get the house keys but I remained motionless. I was scared, even though we are used to earthquakes, until now we had never felt such a strong tremor. I'm still shaking." No damage to the apartment but in the Taipei restaurant he found all the drawers open and some dishes fallen from a shelf. «We heard news of collapses and that there were tilted buildings where the epicenter was. I also heard that there were landslides on the mountainous part with collapsed tunnels and some deaths but otherwise people experienced the earthquake quite normally - adds Rascini -. Here they are prepared for these events and even the buildings and other structures were built with anti-seismic systems capable of resisting earthquakes."
The “Domo de Sardegna”, the only Sardinian one in Taiwan, is normally closed for lunch but today it was open for a small group of customers, including the former Taiwanese representative in Italy in the 2000s. «They came for lunch as if it were a normal day, I didn't expect it: but here life continues even after such a powerful earthquake. And to think that as a Sardinian I wasn't really used to shocks."
(Unioneonline/ss)
