Loudest Moment of Silence Ever

On Monday at 2:28pm, 1 week after the large earthquake in the Sichuan province, China had a national 3 minutes of silence to commemorate the 3 minutes that the earthquake shook the region. In typical Chinese fashion, all the people were asked to be silent and remember those lost or still buried, but the encouraged all trains, cars, boats, and other vehicles to sound their horns and they sounded all the emergency sirens throughout the cities. So the moment of silence ended up being really really loud. Now I am not an expert in Chinese culture, but I do know that point of having the noise is to help the dead in their journey in the after life or something in this realm, so while it may not make sense to have all the noise during the moment of silence, it does make sense when you put it in the context of Chinese culture.