Walking around my tranquil middle class neighborhood in Santiago, you wouldn’t think a major disaster had just occurred — and definitely not one of the five biggest earthquakes in modern history. On Saturday, while my parents back in Seattle spent the day transfixed by TV images of utter devastation, I strolled through the local plaza, observing nothing more abnormal than long, long lines at the few open shops.

The terremoto occurred at 3:34 a.m. Saturday morning. I got home from my first real night out in Santiago — just some chill drinking at a couple nearby bars — around 2:30, so I couldn’t have been asleep for more than an hour when it started. I hail from the Pacific Northwest, also a seismically active area, and I remember vividly the 6.8-magnitude earthquake that shook Seattle back in 2001. Strangely, I remember being much more terrified then, huddled under a desk in my sixth-grade Language Arts classroom, than I was Saturday morning as the quake shook me into consciousness.

At the sound of my host mother screaming my name, I rolled out of bed and felt my way down the stairs, still half-asleep, and outside. After it was over, we huddled on my host sister’s bed, while the family made phone calls to loved ones and my host father somehow tuned in to the radio through his cell phone. Because the house was still standing, only a few books and shelves out of place, I figured the quake hadn’t been too huge — definitely no bigger than any I’d experienced in Seattle. I even fell comfortably back asleep for several more hours. (One kid on my program slept through the entire thing.)

Saturday, as news of the size of the quake (8.8 at the epicenter, about 8.0 in Santiago) and the size of the devastation it had caused reached us, I tried to reconcile this with the relative calm of what I saw nearby: all buildings intact, buses running along the main neighborhood drag, occasional sirens and helicopters interrupting the sleepy afternoon. My host mother twisted both her ankles running downstairs during the quake, but other than that, everyone my family had been able to reach was unharmed.

Because the disaster occurred too late to make the Saturday papers, and we didn’t have electricity, our only source of news was a small battery-powered TV and a car radio blaring in the alley. And because it was still my first week in Chile, I could barely understand anything I heard — Chileans have a habit of not pronouncing consonants, which has made communication difficult for someone with shaky Spanish skills to begin with.

My study abroad program director had called my host family almost immediately after the quake to confirm that I was all right and to assure us that she would relay this to my parents in the U.S. But the lack of contact with anyone outside the house started to drive me crazy. When I finally was able to read the paper on Sunday, I felt ashamed for moping about the lack of electricity and cell phone service and canceled plans for a weekend beach trip, while thousands of people in and around Concepción (the second-largest city in Chile) were dead or missing or in desperate need of water and food. But that’s the strange thing about disasters: they’re at once unifying and isolating, terrifying and stiflingly dull, and it’s possible to be consumed with empathy and self-pity at the same time.

My parents finally reached me at the house on Sunday. They knew I was alive, but not much else, so they were relieved to hear that I wasn’t homeless or starving, and my mom told me she’d posted a message on my Facebook page so friends would know I was safe.

After that 6.8 quake back in sixth grade, I always imagined that anything bigger than a 7.5 or so would be practically apocalyptic, even in a developed country. But because Chile experiences temblores and terremotos so often, they have some of the strictest building codes in the world. That’s why even though Saturday’s quake was some 100 times bigger than Haiti’s, the destruction hasn’t devastated the country to the degree I would have expected. Concepción is like a war zone, with saqueos (looting), a toque de quedo (curfew), and both soldiers and citizens roaming the streets fully armed, but Santiago is more or less returning to normalcy. The metro system is almost fully functional, schools are opening only a week late, electricity is back almost everywhere, and most businesses are open.

The fact that this happened less than a week into my time abroad has actually made it easier, I think, for me to handle. Everything was already new and strange and crazy for me in Santiago, so in some ways the terremoto has been just another part of the insanity for me to navigate. I didn’t have a routine yet in Chile — no pattern of normalcy to be interrupted and shaken to its core. Watching the news was far less surreal for me than for my host sister, because I don’t think of this country as my home; I may as well have been watching from the U.S.

I wish I had more profound things to say about it all. I bet a few months from now, once I’m accustomed to life here and better able to communicate, I’ll be able to process what happened and understand what it means for Chile.

Claire Thompson, Medill junior, is studying abroad in Santiago, Chile.