I already wrote a little bit about the earthquake yesterday, and I do not want to turn this into a news-blog, but here are two pictures showing parts of the apartment when I got home about 4 hours after the earthquake. For the most part the things are ok, apart from Broken Riedel champagne glasses, and well, the printer in the picture above was in pieces. Today has been strangely calm, I should keep on studying Japanese for my final tests next week, my school wrote that unless something severe happens, classes will be as usual from Monday.

There are still aftershocks as I type this, and I have been feeling kind of seasick all day. Apparently there have been over 100 aftershocks and I can not tell if the house is shaking most of the time, or if it is just me who is dizzy.

Apart from that they might take away the electricity for a while to save power, so that means no internet for a while. But I have food and water and everything I need, so I am sure things will be ok. I just want things to get back to normal, everything is very quiet and eerie right now. I can not believe all the damage I see on the TV, what Tokyo experienced was nothing compared to all of those poor people further up north. It is just unreal.

There has been a huge earthquake here today. I believe it was 8.8? First of all, I am ok, and everyone I know is ok.

I was at school when it happened. At first when it started both my classmates and me thought it was just good fun. A lot of smaller quakes happen here all the time, so we did not think much of it. However, the quake did not stop, and it just became stronger and stronger, so we followed procedure, opened the windows and went to stand in the doorway and hid under our desks. And the earthquake just continued and continued for several minutes. We have 避難訓練 (Earthquake drill) once every third month, so at least we knew what we had to do and what not to do. Go away from the windows, make sure you are not next to anything that can fall, hide under your desk so you will not get the lamps and roof falling on your head. All that jazz. We then went to be evacuated at a primary school nearby, but it smelled of gas around the school, so we went to Waseda University instead. Everyone was acting calm and everything worked out ok, but this was the first time I have felt truly scared when an earthquake happened here. They are so usual that nobody even reacted when it first started. When we were walking out of our classroom, a wall with mirrors broke right next to my classmates. Everything was shaking and falling down everywhere. When I finally got back to the apartment, there was a lot of broken glass everywhere, but all the important things (Macbook + cameras) are ok. About the tsunami, I am not scared for me personally, because I do not live on the coast, but I am following the updates on the news, and everything just seems a bit unreal at the moment. I am following the NHK news right now, and I hope things will calm down and the worst is over.

But the important part: I am ok. Everyone I know here is ok.

I made a couple of postcards a some years ago, and I found the files again now. Two weeks from now I have a couple of days of from school, and I will spend them drawing and drinking buckets of coffee.

I am completely staling here. I wonder why it is so much easier thinking about the past than making an effort for the future. I guess I am like most other people – making decisions are scary simply because you feel that when you choose that one thing, you close the door on the 99 other things. Taking pictures in Photo Booth seems like far more fun than studying kanji right now. Worst/best part is that I feel like I really want to do something creative, make something, draw something, I feel spring bubbling all around me, but (un)hopefully the guilt of not studying what I am suppose to do will take over. A very random fact: I haven’t been bored since 1999, and I sometimes envy people who say they are bored, because I can not even grasp the concept, there is so much to do, both on the to-do-list and should-do-list. /End procrastination, back to the books.

I think Dan Ariely is one of my favorite lectures at the TED conferences. He is a behavioral economist, but his research is not dry stuff at all. In this talk Ariely uses classic visual illusions and his own counter-intuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we’re not as rational as we think when we make decisions.

A few years ago I decided to draw a little motivational quote every single day until I eventually got really sick and tired of them, so the result is a whole lot of little cards. Some of them are quite cheesy, but I think a lot of people would run out of nifty and positive things to say after a couple of weeks. I think there is all in all 70-something cards here.

And I can not wait. This is not cherry blossoms though, but plum blossoms. I think? I am not good with botany, but they look pretty. I can not wait until all of Japan is colored pink for a couple of weeks again 🙂 It is my favorite time of year 😀

We went to find a small sake shop hidden in a back steeet, and we were promised very flesh sake.

The main reason for going out is still kind of a secret, but it involves an embassy and filling out some papers 🙂 Hopefully everything will work out fine and will be ready by Tuesday. I just don’t want to jinx it by saying too much too early.

The poor flower is in pain.  We decided to walk back through the park.

I found fluffy birds, so that made my day.

Look at the pretty bird map! 🙂

I have a cold and should really not go outside, but a yummy hamburger for lunch made it worth the trip 🙂

And in the evening we met up with some friends, and I forgot to take pictures of the food before it was gone. It was good though.