Earthquake!

Wow..earthquakes and typhoons in one week. Last Monday (again on my feckin day off) came the strongest typhoon since I`ve been here. Not scary strong by any means but I was out on the balcony behind my bedroom having a look at the scene, and asked my flat mate had he ever seen and damage as it happened. Literally five seconds later a huge water tank from the adjoining apartment building blew off the top and smashed into the sun shade roof for a car on the opposite side of the road. All the plastic from the roof shattered and started blowing around in the wind, and of itself was really dangerous. There was a merc. parked under the roof at the time and I`m suprised it wasn`t destroyed. So the whole thing was pretty cool. And then yesterday, two (big for me) earthquakes; my first since I got here. And as expected I totally freaked out. During first one, at about 7pm, I was sitting in a restaurant on the ground floor of a big building in the middle of Osaka. All the tables and lights and, well, the whole feckin place started shaking and moving like we were on a boat in rough seas. Man, it was freaky. And it lasted for sooo long.. I thought people would run outside (and I was ready to run outside at a moments notice) but apart from people kinda screaming, nobody moved and after a couple of minutes everybody was back to their meal like nothing happened. But my hands were shaking and I couldn`t even tell whether it had stopped or not. Then last night at about midnight another one while I was back in the apartment in Kobe. The whole place shaking back and forth again. This time I got the chance to look outside from the balcony and it was really weird to see all the telephone and electricty poles and wires shaking; people running outside too. I was worried about being on the 4th floor of a building that doesn`t really look like it would meet any sort of standard. Checking the news it seems they were 7.3 and 6.9 on the richter scale which I guess classify as real earthquakes and not wussy tremors. On the news last night they continuously played emergency notices in English warning of tsunamis up to 1.5 metres high! yikes...