I finally went to one of the gardens by my apartment yesterday. I'm usually at work while they're open, but since it was Saturday and I had some time to kill before my friend Matt arrived I spent the morning at the Kyu-Furukawa Garden. It's literally up the street from my house, not half a mile.
I'll put the pictures I took in my albums. I've also been working on understanding the setting on the digital camera I have with me. It's nice to be able to take some time to play with the manual modes for scenery, but also good to be able to just take quick shots in the auto mode.
Anyway, the garden was sort of centered around this "Western style residence". It was basically a big house. These gardens had been created for the house, while it was still a residence and now they're both open to the public. As with Shinjuku Gyoen, there were a bunch of fish and turtles in the pond at the garden. I've been getting attacked by a lot of mosquitoes and been thinking that maybe I should have gotten that vaccination against Japanese encephalitis.
I sat in a corner of the garden reading for a while. At one point, I felt like I was moving. I didn't quite understand how, since I was sitting still. It continued for a while and then stopped. I kept reading, thinking that maybe the heat had gotten to me or that a big truck had gone by or that I was sitting over a subway tunnel. I thought little of it and kept reading.
After a while, I head back to my apartment to drop my stuff off and to go meet my friend Matt at the train station. When we got back to my apartment I discovered that a kid from Penn has been living in my building, but is heading home next week. I guess it's the end of the term here so everyone is leaving. He was wearing a Wharton shirt, so I basically had to stop him and talk to him. He asked me if I had felt the earthquake that morning.
So I experienced my first ever earthquake and didn't even recognize it as one. However that did help take care of one of my hopes for my trip here. I wanted to feel an earthquake. I was ok with this one, it was probably a good beginner earthquake. I don't know if I'd care for a bigger one, but since I have no control over the matter I guess I'll just have to wait and see.
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2 comments:
Dude, AWESOME! And thanks for not titling this post "earthquake" because I would have just assumed you were dead and I wouldn't have read it.
That's so weird, the way you describe it. I always imagined even small quakes would feel like vibration. But from your story I pictured more of a slow sliding motion, very slight. Am I way off base here?
Well the earthquake was just a side effect of the trip to the garden.
I think you would expect vibrations, but the period of the earthquakes is long so they aren't short, quick vibrations.
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