Date 11.03.2011
As you all know Rob and I travelled to Japan in March this year. I've always wanted to go to Japan, me and rob paid for the holiday a year in advance and spent alot of time in the months prior to the leaving for Japan marking out places on google maps of where we wanted to go and what we wanted to see and do.
Herajuku was the one place we could not wait to see or go shopping at, it is the fashion capital of Tokyo and has such an amazing feel about the place but we did not ge to enjoy as we had hoped.
We go to herajuku and went directly to the markets then off to kinji the a massive op shop store then went out to lunch before deciding to head down to Kiddyland!! a place I have wanted to go since I was 16 and seen a film of Marilyn Manson shopping there it looked so amazingly fun!
As we were walking down there it hit, the earthquake. It was the second earthquake we had been part of in the short 5 days that we had been in the country but it was definitely alot bigger then the other one.
We were about to cross the road when I felt my knees give in there were shaking crazily I could barley stand I grabbed on to Rob and said "do you feel that".. he had no idea what I was on about until I pointed at the traffic lights above us that were had started shaking around uncontrollably.
Then all of sudden out of no where down came this loud rumbling noise it was the start of all the buildings shaking and a swaying and looking closely you could see filing cabinets and tables being flung across the the rooms of the buildings in front of us. Watching a Japanes man across the road from us we could tell he was directing everyone to move into the centre of the road were we were standing to avoid and objects that may come flying out of buildings.
Its taken me so long to try to even start writting about this day because even now things remind me of that day, at work we have a train station right next to us and at 7pm most nights a train will go past which shakes our whole building I still have to grab on to my table and start looking around, its something that will always stay with me, the weird feeling of being moved by the earth and having no control.
The day only seemed to get worse as we do not speak any Japanese we did not understand what people we saying and we could not communicate with people about what we should do, we waited around for hours at a large park at the top of a hill with many people, there was constant voice overs a megaphone telling the Japanese people what to do and what was happening but of course we had no idea, sirens of ambulances and police were going past every 30 mins but we were left there wondering how long it would be until the train were back working.
The harderst thing was there was no phone signal it took me over and hour to get a msg to my mum to say were safe but by then the news had already been broadcast to Australia about the Tsunami so of course our families were worried.
Afer a few hours we could finally make phone calls to speak to our family and let them know we were safe, but we were still unsure ourselves how we were going to get back to our hotel that night, we had no maps, no Internet and it was starting to get cold and dark real quick.
It took 7 hours before we would get back to the hotel, the hotel was only 9ks away but due to there being no trains the roads were chaos.
We were so grateful to get taxi home and ther driver was so lovely he couldn't Speak English but used his ipad to translate information to us about what had happened that day, this is when we found out that there had been a 10 meter high Tsunami and that the fukashima nuclear plant had been affected.
I think we were so numb from the whole day, we realised it wasn't until 2 days later when we went to go to sleep in our own bed at home that we had time to come out of shock and realise what we had been apart of, everything was so rushed and so confusing and we really went into survival mode.
Throughout that morning there was constant after shocks and another 2 earthquakes that racked 7.5 on the scale, we knew it was time to leave Japan when our hotel told us there was no food or water and that all shops around us would be closed.
After another 6 hour taxi ride we made it to the airport and were lucky enough not to miss out flight home.
We were happy to be home, just to be able to shower and grab some food and see our families and beautiful dogs.
But we definitely miss Japan it was a great place, with beautiful people, we are already planning our next trip back there, which will hopefully be this year for new years :)
Sorry this is so late but there is just to much that happened in that one day that I can not fit into one blog.
