Small quakes

You know this feeling, when you have had a little too much to drink and everything seems to spin around?

Well that is what you worry might happend in a split second until you realise that you havn't been drinking anything and that the flowers in the vase beside you really are shaking....

We felt two more earthquakes this weekend - but very small ones: The lamps didn't bother to move this time...neighter did we.

The picture is a souvenir we bought in Iwaki. It says Smile! Buying it was rather fun as the artist wanted us to take part of a kind of lottery by choosing 10 little origami folded papers from a bowl. Eventhough we only was intitled to one prize according to what our little papers said, he gave us three prizes. Sometimes it is ok to stick out from the crowd. Each prize was a little stone on which he had painted small cute fish.

Earthquake

This morning we felt our sofa vibrating, the dining table lamp was dangling from side to side and our closets were making strange sounds. Automatically we listened with tension to hear if we had made a huge mistake by putting all our crystal glasses on shelves, as we felt our first real, though relative small earthquake.

We cannot say it felt dangerous, but there is some sort of excitement to the virgin feeling of a shaking sofa beneath you. We got a vague feeling of being bystanders incapable of preventing it from happening and of being bystanders to the destined consequences. The only thing to do was to wait until it was over.

The Japanese do not use the Richter scale to measure the earthquakes; - instead they use the JMA scale, where Shindo 7 is the most powerful and damaging earthquake and the Shindo 0 impossible to feel as a human being. (Read more about the Japanese earthquake scale here.)
A little surfing on the internet led us to a huge earthquake that took place by the coast west of where we are living (see picture) just the same time as we felt it here. This earthquake was at the top end of the JMA-scale with a shindo 6 (and 6.9 on the Richter scala according to Danish Newspapers: http://politiken.dk/udland/article271548.ece), which means that it is impossible to move during the earthquake unless you crawl. The epicentre was located 353 kilometres from Koriyama, reducing the earthquakes effect to a shindo 2 for us.