Reasons I have not posted in a while:
1) I was busy writing a long guest post for Caroline of “Spooning with a Schoolboy” on Vegetarianism in Japan (which will be published within the next few weeks I’m guessing).
2) I then got sick with the cold from hell.
3) Um… Snowapocalypse 2011? No, in fact I have just been lazy about it.
But speaking of the Snowapoclypse, it was very underwhelming for me. For those who don’t know, I live in the Southwestern part of Michigan. We get a lot of snow here, and have already had 2 blizzards this winter, so I'm used to this okay. This blizzard however was supposed to be THE BIG ONE. You know, like the one back in 65 (according to my father) where snow drifts are a big as houses, and 30 inches of snow fall. Yeah, well we did get drifts but they are not as big as houses, and we only got like a foot of snow, so I am unimpressed. Though a ton of places are closed today even though the roads don’t seem to be terrible and it has stopped snowing and the sun is shining.
This hysteria and disappointment remind me of when we would experience typhoons (everyone called them tsunamis, but tsunamis happen on water... like big crushing wave, storm on land is a typhoon/hurricane so I will be referring to them the proper way) and earthquakes in Japan. Since I live in Michigan I had experienced neither of these forces of nature before. During our orientation period, CIEE took us to Ikebukuro’s Honjo Bosaikan (Life Safety Learning Center) where we were required to crawl through a smoke maze, learn how to us a fire extinguisher (while shouting “KAJI DA!” much to our own amusements) , sit in a earthquake simulator room, and watch an educational film about earthquakes in Japan and how the next “BIG ONE” for Tokyo is just around the corner. In all seriousness though, when that “big one” does hit, it could be pretty catastrophic so it is scary.
I only recall experiencing three earthquakes while I was in Japan. The first of which I actually slept straight through without feeling a thing. It was only in the morning at breakfast when my Okaasan asked if the earthquake had scared me in the night that I even knew we had one. Maggie, the other student living with us, also slept through it. Okaasan said that she jumped up when it happened and wanted to come see if we were ok (since it was our first) but that Otousan told her we were fine and not to worry, so she looked out the window to see if the lights in our windows were on, which they weren’t, so she figured we were all right. Bless her. The second earthquake happened while I was in my Japanese class, and I thought at the time that my friend Tom (who sat behind me) was shaking his foot on my chair to be annoying. It wasn’t until after class when he asked if we had felt the earthquake that I realized it wasn’t him. Sorry Tom. The last earthquake I remember happened in the night, and I remember feeling the shaking in my dream, then waking up and realizing that everything REALLY WAS shaking! But I was so sleepy, I just thought, “Oh, it’s an earthquake”, and went right back to sleep. So much for being concerned about my own safety. Earthquakes just weren’t as scary as I thought they would be.
We had two typhoons hit while I was there, and the first was actually so bad that they canceled classes. It really wasn’t too bad, just a lot of strong winds and heavy rain, but that makes terrible conditions for the trains to run so most of them shut down (except subway, but all my trains were above ground). I remember the typhoon had hit during the night, and it passed before noon the next day. I had to wait for a text message from CIEE saying if we would have classes or not in the morning. Oh did I ever pray to the Kamisama for that text message. I sat watching the news on TV about how so many JR lines had shut down, and my Okaasan even told me I didn’t have to go, so I was already planning on skipping but it was nice to get the confirmation that it was ok. Even if we DID still have class I wouldn’t have been able to get there because two of my train lines shut down. But I heard that a couple of my classmates actually did end up going to class without knowing, and then got stranded because the trains lines shut down after. The weather was GORGEOUS after the storm passed. Really blue skies and sunshine. So Maggie and I went to explore a town on one of the stops along our line called Noborito with our friend Erika who also lived along that train line. Only the train times were all screwed up, and some were only going in one direction, so it took us a little longer to get there even though it’s only like a 10 minute train ride away. The second typhoon that hit barely even touched us. I think it had actually stayed more off land, so really there was only some heavy rain and winds but not enough to seriously disrupt things.
I mostly think people just enjoy the thrill of freaking out when it comes to mother nature.
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