3/11/11 Personal Experience

It was a Friday afternoon, about 15 minutes till school was over: 15 minutes till the weekend. I was in Japanese class, and some of my friends and I were extremely bored. We were supposed to be writing an essay or researching something for a project and none of us were really doing what we were supposed to. We were just waiting for the time to pass. We felt a small tremor. One of our friends was erasing something on her paper so we just assumed it was her shaking the table. But then the tremor continued, it was still quite small at the time. Another one of our friends went under the table, as we had learned to do through our numerous earthquake drills. The rest of us made fun of her, "Haha, what are you doing? It isn't even that big."She would soon prove the rest of us wrong. And then we felt it. Everything shook, and we were all instructed to go under the table. We not only felt the shaking, but we also heard it. The creaking of the school, the banging of decorations on the wall. The shaking continued on to major shaking, and then rocking. It was like nothing I had ever felt. The teacher stood by the doorframe, looking to see if there were students who were still in the hallways. She kept telling us, "don't worry, the school is built to withstand strong earthquakes." It was a long earthquake. I wondered whether this was the long awaited big Kanto earthquake. After the shaking stopped, the whole school gathered on the field in case an even bigger earthquake hit. It took us around 9 hours to get home on the bus. And in the days following, it was weird to see Japanese convenient stores, super markets, and the streets of Tokyo empty.