Thought I'd just write a quick blog post to keep everyone up to date.
Luckily, there is nothing much to report! We are still in Osaka with Seth and Haruna. We went to a small "record" bar in the downtown area where Seth was one of a couple of guest DJs and listened to a lot of good music. It was a nice change, but we stayed up fairly late for this pair of old farts.
The weather has finally turned for the better with a high of 61.
We dragged ourselves out to the river bank today for a picnic lunch and welcome sunshine. Joan's swollen foot finally felt the rays of the sun. It shone bright pink, scaring fish right out of the river! She's now able to stretch it and put a little weight on it. We're pretty excited and
looking forward to crutch-free days.
As I said before, we hope to return to Tokyo this coming week. We desperately want to be home, just doing our regular things. This limbo of not knowing what is going to happen next or when we should go home is killing us! It's hard to focus on anything productive, such as studying Japanese, exercise, or writing - very frustrating...
If you have been following the reactor situation in Fukushima, today is hopefully the day they will be able to bring electrical power to the plant. Hopefully, they will be able restart the cooling systems and get some sort of control of the situation. Today could be reactors #1 and #2; tomorrow would be #3 and #4. Here's hoping...
It is so hard to truly get a feel of what is going on there. Media, both international and Japanese, seems all over the page and inconsistent. There's talk of not being able to trust the information coming from TEPCO (the Japanese power company) nor the government. Obviously they have to be very cautious with what they say. A panic would be horrible, but so would not telling the public what they need to and should know.
We talked to friends in Tokyo today, and they report that all is OK in our area and Tokyo in general. There are still some shortages of perishable foods, toilet paper, gasoline, but it is getting better. Trains are running. Life goes on. But.... Everyone is watching the situation in Fukushima.
And the worse thing is, it is taking the focus away from rescue (unfortunately, mostly recovery) efforts up north. The magnitude of what happened up there is still being assessed, and it looks to just get worse and worse. It will be extremely difficult and expensive to recover and rebuild; no one seems sure how it will be done, but everyone is resolute that it must be done.
We hope all is well with you and yours. I can't wait for our life to get so boring again that I'll forget to write on this blog for a looooong time...
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