wake up

25 april 2005

....so, i don't think that i mentioned our rude awakening on the 19th of april.
john and i were peacefully sleeping at 6:15 in the morning when we were rudely awakened by the building groaning and shaking violently. the general motion was back and forth, but coming out of a dead sleep, it felt (and sounded) more like waking up on a very old rollercaoster - loose bolts and all. we understood immediately what was going on, but are unaccustomed to such things. i tried to stand and grabbed a blanket yelling to john to run to the bathroom - our smallest room. he couldn't find his galsses and as everyone knows this puts him in the same situation as velma in scooby doo when the monster is coming and everyone has to wait for her to do the same.

so we made it to the bathroom. john grabbed a flashlight on the way and we sat on the floor hovered in our blanket and waited it out.


in actuality, i don't think that it could have been much more than 40 seconds? 50? we crawled back to bed when the groaning and swaying stopped. the only real damage was our tv and stand fell on the floor and punctured a tatami mat. that and a bamboo shoot that the last tenants left for us lost it's vase. the thing that amazes me here, is that we actually went back to sleep. the next three hours were filled with regular and strong aftershocks. many of them woke us and we would instantly stand, glasses and blanket in hand and be ready to bolt to the bathroom. the tremor would stop and we'd lay back down and sleep tenuously until the next one.

the earthquake's magnitude was 5.7 and the epicenter was just off the coast of fukuoka. when i think about it now, i'm quite pleased that we were sleeping when it hit. had i been awake, i would have had time to think about the building collapsing and all sorts of other gruesome scenarios. as it was though, we were too sleepy to think of any thing other than the basics.
sometime thismorning there was another aftershock that woke us up again. i have no details on it other than it didn't last long enough to get us out of bed. i guess this is something that we just become accustomed to.

the neat thing about the city is that there was very little damage. (there's even little trace of the march 20th quake of 7.2) just like the stereotype, the japanese workers were out like ants and busy mending every little crack they could find. within two, three days it's difficult to find a trace in the city.
so that's all for now. we weren't going to mention the quakes so as not to worry family too much, nor excite foes too much, but you can all read the news, eh? so life is good here in the east and keeping us on our toes.