Unexpected and scary, but memorable!!

Well, I guess a California vacation would not be complete without experiencing the thing that many people associate with California: EARTHQUAKES!!
Yep, we experienced one, and, not simply a tremor. Apparently this was the real thing.
To set the stage a bit, we are currently in the Embassy suites at LAX airport. An 8 story, box shaped building with a very open atrium in the middle. This means that you can look across the atrium to the other side of the building. This sight allows a very good indication of how much a building would be swaying in an Earthquake.

Some views from our room
We are on the top floor (8th) of this building. After a leisurely breakfast we were making our final preparations for our day at the beach (Venice beach this time). I slowly felt some tremors and looked at Anastasia to see if she noticed also. Just then the tremors increased in magnitude and i got up from the table to call the others. Immediately i opened the room door and saw some hotel employees scrambling around the elevators, which stopped working immediately. At that point i looked across the atrium and saw the magnitude of the movements and yelled to all that we are "getting out now". As we are foreigners here, it is difficult to gauge what is normal and what is more than normal. I asked one of the employees about ranking this relative to the regular tremors that they have, and he said "this is bad"! We started to walk more quickly down the stairs!
But, at the second floor the stairwell ended, with no indicators of how to proceed on. We scrambled a bit, found a hotel employee who had to figure out a way out herself. Not good Embassy Suites!
Anyway, we finally made it out of the hotel and witnessed discussions all day about this event.
So i guess we can attribute this to another "vacation event", this one being quite memorable!