Shake, Rattle and Roll

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Now I know it's not been long since my last blog entry but something quite bizarre happened to us early this morning that we wanted to tell you about. It was about 5am and I woke up for no apparent reason. It felt like the bed was a bit bouncy and my first thought was that Glynn was messing around for some reason. I was about to ask him what he was doing when I notcied he was fast asleep. Then it dawned on me what was happening. I woke Glynn up and broke the news to him that I thought we were in the midst of an earthquake, to which he simply relied 'cool'!

Obviously in a suituation like this it's important to stay calm and think about the best way to get to safefy. By this time the hotel was actually swaying - I kid you not - and we were on the 9th floor - eek! What was the best thing to do? Get dressed and head for safety? Of course. What did we do? We ran straight to the window to watch it all going on outside!

Joking aside, the sensation was quite bizarre and through our window we could see more clearly just how much our building really was swaying. The thing that struch me the most for some reason though was that the river water below us was rippling in completely straight lines. We had jokingly said that we hoped to experience being in a small earthquake whilst on our travels but didn't expect it to really happen - I guess you have to be careful what you wish for...

We are now in Osaka at our next hotel, the fantastically named Hotel Kinki (yes, we did choose this place just for the name!) and despite searching online, I can't seem to find out what magnitude the earthquake was. I did discover that a monitoring station in the south of Japan registered a quake out at sea with a magnitude of 6.3 on the Richter Scale but I doubt we felt anything near that kind of force. If anyone can find out for us somehow, we'd be interested to know. Hiroshima, 5am Sunday local time, 10pm Saturday night UK time. We're safe and well any way and in fact the walk in Miyajima yesterday probably did us far more damage!!

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