Earthquake after-pics

Hello there,

first of all: sorry for hardly updating my blog throughout the year. Well, well. I mostly blog about traveling and since I got back from Asia I hardly traveled at all, so there you have one reason. Anyways.

Now one more blog entry about the Tohoku earthquake before I get to blog about more pleasant things again. Once again, to recap: I was very lucky not to be anywhere near when it all happened (check my last couple of blog entries for details).
This time I won't bother you with overly long texts but I just wanted to blog some more pics.

First of all: after getting back to Europe, I was closely following the news. Almost no information from Japanese media, and overly panicking stuff in Western media. Some of those really made me angry with its stupidity. An example of nuclear idiocy:

Austrian boulevard news

 

What I hate about this headline: it's trying to create panic here in the middle of Europe for no reason. While there were thousands of people in Japan with real problems in the aftermath of the earthquake.
(short explanation of the headline: it translates to "nuclear cloud above Austria today". The background was that we had measurable outcomes from the Fukushima power plant in Austria. But measurable doesn't mean of any significance. With today's methods we can detect quicksilver in our drinking water, as my chemistry high-school teacher used to say. Because it's in there, but below any significant level)

Now for some personal pics that had quite an impact when I first saw them. They were sent to me by the nice Japanese friend of mine who cleared out my dorm room in Tokyo for me.

This is what my room looked like after the earthquake. All the mess and stuff out of the shelves, well, that was the earthquake (spare me the jokes about my room being messy because of my own doing). What impressed/shocked me the most besides all the stuff on the floor: the room between the shelf and the desk/shelf-combination on the second pic. Up until I saw this I wasn't even aware that my desk and that shelf left of it were two separate pieces of furniture - same material and they stood there attached to each other. That ~30cm gap between them was done by the Tohoku earthquake. Meaning that the earthquake moved around the furniture. Possibly also the many after-quakes, but those were rather small (for Japan) and I've had quite some earthquakes while living there, and none of them had moved my furniture.

So much for that. I'll leave you for now the same as last year:
よいおとしを！
(yoio toshi o! which would be "Guten Rutsch!" in German)