DAY FORTY-SIX, FORTY-SEVEN, AND FORTY-EIGHT: Lunch With Chieko’s family and a… TYPHOON!!!!!!!!!!!

Konnichiwa family and friends,

On Friday (the 20th) and Saturday (the 21st) we did not do much, just some school. Sunday, however, was really exciting! We started by jumping on the train to Tokyo. Once we had arrived, we went to have lunch with Chieko and her family. Chieko met us at the train station with two cars, with her father and her husband driving. The cool thing about Chieko’s apartment is that each floor in the apartment building, is an entire apartment. So when the elevator doors opened, we were looking at the front door of her apartment. We had a great time visiting with Chieko and her family. She made us delicious traditional food, and we had a lot of fun playing with her sons, Sola and Watalu.

I played some card games with Sola, same as when they came to our house (DAY THIRTY-FIVE), and he is REALLY good at the matching game. He beat me every time (once I let him win, but every other time it was all him), with almost twice as many matches as I had. I also enjoyed picking up Watalu and holding him in my lap. We had some really special family time with them and I am glad we had that opportunity.

Afterward we went to our Air B&B and got Domino’s pizza for dinner. Before we had come to Tokyo we had heard that there was going to be a typhoon coming through. This had made us wonder if it wasn’t safe to come to Tokyo. We eventually decided after emailing different Japanese friends and family that it wouldn’t be very big and that the worst of the typhoon would be at night. It turns out it was bigger than we expected. Right before bed Mom and Dad found out that in some parts of Japan people were being told to prepare to evacuate. Also on the news it said that this was going to be a really big storm and do lots of damage, with wind and flooding. This made Mom and Dad nervous, but we still went to bed. We were not sure what our area was going to experience, and we thought that we would have been told if we were supposed to evacuate. I was sleeping peacefully until in the middle of the night I heard the wind… it came in big gusts, each one more powerful than the last. The first gust would be strong but the last gust would sound like thunder or a really big semi truck barreling past. It was stronger than the wind I experienced at the top of Mount Fuji! The biggest gusts were kind of scary, because it seemed like if you were to go outside you would be blown away instantly in a gust and thrown into a building. It was really cool…until we all heard it… a siren, not like any we had heard yet in Japan! Nothing makes you wake up better than a little adrenalin. Then there was also someone talking loudly on a speaker, which made us even more nervous, especially because it was all in Japanese. Dad went outside to see if people were evacuating and I used that time to get dressed and fill up my water bottle. I knew from all the survival stuff I had learned and from being a boy scout that every little bit of water counted. Meanwhile Hannah, Mom, and Bayus… stayed in bed. When Dad returned from the typhoon outside he said that it seemed like everything was fine. He said he still saw cars driving by slowly and even a early morning jogger with ear buds in his ears. So we went back to bed, nervous and unsure. Later in the night we heard it again, I stayed in bed this time, Dad still checked outside but found everything the same. It turns out… we didn’t die or have to evacuate. It was both a scary and exciting experience!

Elias