Becoming more real.

Today things are becoming a little more real.

I woke up and tried to go to work this morning. I was expecting some trouble with trains, and I was pretty sure I would be late, but when I got to the station, this is what I found:
















No trains were running at all yet. I didn't know yet, but because of the power outages scheduled, the JR company (which runs the trains) decided to only run minimal trains today. There were no trains going north, so I was unable to go to work. My roommate was also unable to get to her school, so we were forced to come back home.



(There was a news station filming the people at my station, which is a major station for my area.)
















Taxis became a popular option for trying to get places. This is the taxi waiting area, and in the morning it is usually half full of taxis waiting for customers. Today there was a line stretching the entire length of the station waiting for taxis. I was happy to be allowed to go back home.


I was also fortunate to find a news feed in Japanese and another in English on YouTube and Ustream respectively, so we've been able to keep up on what's going on for the most part.


It looks like the rolling power outages have finally started, but we might not be effected until tomorrow. Hopefully we'll be able to go to work tomorrow, since tomorrow is the graduation ceremony for the 3 year students. I'll wake up extra early to try to make it tomorrow.

We filled up as many containers as we could with water today and bought some food supplies like nuts and boxed vegetable juice that doesn't expire quickly, so we can go for a while with that if we need to. Then we packed up some clothes, blankets, water and other various supplies and took them over to our new apartment. We now have two shelters where we have access to in case something more serious happens.

When we got to the apartment, we found there was a little structure damage, some broken tiles and some plumbing issues, but there were workmen there already fixing it when we go there. None of the damage was inside our apartment. Some of the sliding doors had been shaken open however.

We did find a little surprise from our rental company waiting for us: two water bottles outside our door with a note. That was really nice of them.




Later we decided we would like to buy a few more supplies and decided to walk to the shopping center, only to discover it was closed today. We met a little old lady along the way who was very delighted to practice English with us. Then she gave us broccoli from her garden and told us we must cook it tonight. I'll do that once I'm done blogging. ;-)

We are very lucky where we are. I have a friend who is married to a Japanese man, who is very kind in passing along information in English for us, and we have found plenty of news access and have some translation tools for figuring out basic stuff.

I am very thankful for all we have been given. The future is still very much uncertain, and we still have several weeks of aftershocks that could be quite large until we can really start to see how things are going to be for a while.

All I know is that I'm sure this is going to impact life here in Japan for a long time.