Back home again

It's been a busy week. Last I posted, I wasn't sure if I could bring our parents on the trip we'd planned for them due to the earthquake incident. And it didn't help that we needed to be in Kanazawa (~2hr drive via the Noto Yuryo (Noto Toll Rd) before 9am for our train. Footages and reports of the earthquake on the television showed us that huge chunks of the Yuryo had broken off so obviously some parts of the Toll Road was unusable. Yay for anxiety and having to wake up extra extra early to start on the journey.

Anyway, the trip is done, and Rob's mum is on her way back home to Perth. My parents will be staying for a few more days. Even though Rob and I have previously been to all the places that we brought our parents to, we had some new dining experiences that we didn't manage to fit in on our previous trips. I will soon write about them as soon as I have some extra time on my hands.

A few things:

- on our drive down to the city for our train to Osaka on Monday morning, we actually felt the tremor of another aftershock whilst in the car. I thought someone in the car was thumping their feet to the beat of the music in the car. Apparently Noto had many more aftershocks during the week, including a pretty major one on Wednesday morning hitting around 5 on the Richter scale. I told Rob that the aftershocks were probably more terrifying than the first one. The first one hit without warning and I didn't really have time to react. With the aftershock tremors, I was filled with the dread that it might build up worse than the first one.

- I found out last night that the lady who died as a casualty from the earthquake was my supervisor's sister-in-law. How sad.. He also just got transferred to another school so he will be my 'ex' supervisor as of this week (yet another thing that annoys me about the Japan education system - the Board of Education decides who stays in a school and who gets transferred to another school in April every year).

- it's amazing how quickly the Japanese people recover from a disaster. Reading, seeing memorials and watching videos about how the people recovered from the Hiroshima 'A-bomb' and the 1996 Kobe earthquake is one thing, but actually witnessing it is another.

That's all from me for now! Thanks for all your concerns - life is back to normal for the Noto-ites, like the earthquake never happened..