Japan's Strongest Earthquake in 100 Years...

Yesterday was crazy... Everything around here stopped due to the earthquake and you could see some people walking around with these kind of hats in order to protect themselves from falling objects, fires and other dangers.

You can buy the hat at Rakuten. A child wearing this hat came up to me and some friends from nowhere and said "Konbanwa!" = "Good evening!" His family had put these hats on all their children. Seeing that made it feel like it was also a space invasion going on...

Penny that used to live in the same "Guest House" as me took this picture of children outside
a school wearing these kind of hats. More pictures at her blog here.

My friend Jakob took this picture of me standing next to one of many cracks that appeared in
the walls of our school.

I was eating Ramen with some friends at a small restaurant while talking with a 70 year old drunk Japanese man when the eartquake struck. It started shaking a little bit and then the Japanese man jumped down under his table and started screaming "Get down!!". 

We just laughed at him because small earthquakes happens once in a while here. But this one didn't stop for several minutes and just got stronger and stronger. I thought the lamps inside would fall down on us so I ran outside.

All the cars had stopped and the streets were flooding with people. Some of them were crying and the buildings was shaking so much that for a moment I thought that Tokyo was about to fall apart...

But then it calmed down before another one with similar power struck. The Japanese man was a bit angry at me when I came back inside and said:
-"You should never leave your group!"

Even when the eartquake was over we still didn't really understand what a catastrophe this had been in some places of Japan. When we came to school they told everybody to evacuate to this local.

Some people had just come to Tokyo some hours ago and must have thought that this is part of daily life in Japan, so people started joking with them saying things like:
-"If you thought this one was big you should have seen the one yesterday".

You have all probably been seeing these crazy pictures of places in ruins with cars floating around. Those pictures are mostly from north Japan where the Tsunami hit, which seems to have done more damage than the actual Earthquake.

The damage in Tokyo was nothing like this, but it still felt crazy to experience it. I'm so regretful that
I didn't have my camera this day, but since more than 1200 people is dead or missing in Japan now
I should just be happy that me and everyone I know is okey.

You couldn't call anyone and all the trains stopped so the lines to pay phones, buses and bicycle stores were extreme... A good thing in this situation is that the Japanese people are so organized and don't panic too much which could have made it more dangerous.

While writing this I can actually feel my room shaking a bit. It's been small earthquakes throughout
this day too, but I think the danger is over for now?