"I feel the earth shake, under my feet!" errr....sorry, this isn't karaoke night, is it? As most of you have heard by now, our part of Okinawa experienced a 7.0 earthquake our Saturday morning about 5:30am. It was exciting! Brandon likened it to not being sure if we were going to lift off (the up and down shaking) or if the island was going to pull up anchor and float off to sea (the length-wise swaying of our bed.) It only lasted about 15 seconds, but it was exciting while it was happening. (I know, I know, we're crazy kids! But to be fair, it wasn't THAT big and didn't cause damage.)
No photos were knocked off the walls or anything like that. One of our photo frames, a nick knack, and our Jango Fett action figure toppled over from the swaying (we're on the 4th floor), but that was it. We took a photo as proof. (And just in case you Star Wars enthusiasts like myself were worried, the awesome Mandalorian armor Jango wears kept him from harm. One of his guns is a bit bent though. "Battle scars.")
It was interesting reading some of the news stories that came out following our earthquake (and before Chile's.) We read everything from "still waiting for casualty reports," "haven't gotten responses from the island" and our favorite, "the same size as Haiti's earthquake" (and they took their sweet time to quietly mention that ours was 40 miles farther off the coast and 18 miles deep under the sea.) I was certain I was going to be reading about the "zombie apocalypse" in some of the articles! When did reporting news become wanting to get people stirred up to raise ratings rather than actually reporting the facts?! Grrr! [Arielle steps off soap box...] Anyways, on to the following day...
We can officially now say we have missed church due to a tsunami warning. Bet you never thought of using that excuse! :) No one seemed overly concerned about it on our island, but we didn't want to run the risk of getting stuck on base, so we decided staying off base would be a better way to spend our Sunday. The tsunami was predicted to hit around 3:10pm on the other side of our island. Didn't hear if it did or not, but things seemed fairly normal when we went to dinner on the Sea Wall.
Caught a nice sunset photo from Fab's deck.
And a colorful photo of Brandon's curry rice.
On the walk back to our apartment, we watched these guys catch a squid.
He held it up long enough for a photo op, but it was squirting ink everywhere. Pretty neat!
There were some nice waves tonight, although not bigger than we've seen before a storm.
The moon was huge tonight! So cool!
It was "this big!" :)
So to reiterate, thank you for the outpouring of concern, but no worries. We can now chalk "large earthquake" and "tsunami" off our list of things to experience. Whew, and all that in two days! Pretty impressive! Now, on to the next adventure!
---Arielle
