Damage

I’m finally back on the internet again after almost a week. Things are starting to get semi-normal. We have power, internet, and telephone (land line and cell). We still don’t have water yet (so I’m probably pretty stinky now), and most of the stores are still closed, so getting food can be a bit difficult sometimes. We still have enough to eat though. We also can’t get any gasoline, and the trains are not even close to running any time soon. It’s not so bad though, considering how some people are having a much worse time right now.

Anyways here’s some photos of the damage around my neighborhood. It’s nowhere near as bad as some of the stuff you’ve probably seen on TV. In fact it’s kind of trivial compared to the tsunami damage.The first three are at our house. The earthquake almost toppled the wall behind our house.

It’s actually very lucky that it fell away from the house. Below is a stone ornament thing in our garden. The earthquake just shattered it to pieces.

During the earthquake I was standing near it, and didn’t even notice it falling down (or the wall for that matter). Everything was shaking so much and for so long, I thought it was never going to end. I could barely even stand up. I had to hold onto a post, but I still had problems keeping my feet on the ground. It was easily the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced.

Below is several photos of my immediate neighborhood.

Most of the worst damage was to older buildings. Below a temple gate fell right over.

Some of the streets just cracked right open. When I was driving the other day I saw a crack in the road almost half a foot wide. Also I saw a section where the road sank over a foot! These are smaller ones just down the street from my house.

Since the earthquake we’ve experienced almost constant aftershocks.  Some quite substantial too. In fact some of the aftershocks have been stronger than earthquakes we’ve had before. Thankfully it’s starting to settle down to one or two every couple of hours. So that’s the current up date as it stands so far.

Oh by the way I forgot to mention that the inside of our house was completely trashed. Stuff was everywhere, and a lot of it was broken. One thing that surprised me was one of our heavy shelves actually had moved a foot and a half sideways! Also our fridge toppled over and hit a shelf . I found it sitting diagonal with the doors wide open and the food all over the ground.

Status

Sorry everyone. I haven’t been able to update everyone until now. We are all OK so far. Currently we have no water, land-line telephone and internet (still just my kindle). We just got power today. We weren’t affected by the tsunamis since we are thankfully surrounded by mountains. Also so far we haven’t been affected by the radiation problem in Fukushima. I am sorry but I still can’t access facebook. They are blocking my kindle from it. So until I have internet I wont be able to access it. So somebody please post a link of this page on my wall. Also sorry to all new commenters on the site. I can’t moderate comments on my kindle so it’ll have to wait until later.

Eric

Space

I’ve been experimenting a lot with my new camera. I got a T-mount so I could hook it up directly to my telescope. It works really good. I was able to take a few moon shots really easily. Here’s one of them.

I also tried taking some pictures of the Orion nebula. I was only semi successful. You can see the nebula, but only faintly.

Not bad for a first attempt. Considering it’s over 20 light years away, I think I did OK. Taking photos of nebula are quite difficult to do useless you’re willing to spend ridiculous amounts of money. I’m definitely going to try again though. Next time I’ll shoot in RAW (I forgot to this time), and I’ll try to do it when it’s not a full moon out so the sky will be extra dark. There’s supposed to be a new moon on Friday, so if weather is permitting I might try again. By the way you can larger version by clicking on the photos.

Sendai at Night

Here’s some photos I took downtown in Sendai with my new camera. Enjoy!

Leaves and Ice

Here’s a couple macro photos I took on Saturday after the little snow storm we had here in Miyagi.

As usual you can click on the photo for a larger version.

Idaho and Texas2

I mentioned before that McDonald’s Japan was going to have a second round of their “Big America”. Well I’ve tried the first two so far. The first was the “Texas2” burger.

It’s pretty similar to the old Texas burger, except it has chili and sliced onions on it instead of BBQ sauce and fried onions. I thought it was very good, but the original Texas burger edges it out due to my love of the BBQ sauce on it.

Number two is called the “Idaho” burger. The reason probably being the hash brown in the burger.

The burger also has a mustard mayo relish, bacon, cheese, and BBQ sauce on it. At first I was a little apprehensive about potato on a burger, but it actually turned out to be pretty damn good. Probably very high calorie though. The next one is “Miami”, which supposedly has taco meat on it. It just started yesterday so I haven’t had a chance to try. I’ll give my opinion on at a later date.

Holland

Here’s a few pictures of Holland. Mostly of Amsterdam.

So this finally concludes my European holiday photos. It only took me like six months to put them up! I really have to work hard to be this lazy!

Fussen

Fussen was really cool. It had two really beautiful castles, and tons of mountains. It was one of my favourite parts of the trip.

The Eagle’s Nest

Here’s some photos of the Eagle’s Nest, which was Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat. It’s quite near the small town of Berchtesgaden. The area was quite beautiful, but you won’t really get to see it in the photos because it was so rainy and foggy. Some of the photos are of Berchtesgaden itself.

Above and below is the tunnel leading to the elevator to get to the Eagle’s Nest. We were already super high up in the mountains at this point.

You can kind of see the Eagle’s Nest  at the top of the mountain here.

Here’s Berchtesgaden.

They had a really stage two colored river there. It was really weird!

It was actually two rivers merging together.

Munich

While we were in Munich it rained a hell of a lot, so I wasn’t able to get a lot of good pictures. Here’s a few that turned out not bad. I snapped them from the top of the Glockenspiel.