As a high school student going to Japan I wasn’t really worried about natural disasters. Sure I had known about earthquakes, and this was years before the horrific earthquake and tsunami of 2011. I was mainly worried if I had enough spending money, and was just so excited about the trip in general. Being from Colorado, we rarely get earthquakes, and when we do they are so minor it hardly registers beyond a few pictures on the walls rattling.
Thankfully, for me, the earthquake I experienced in Japan was very minor. On our last night in Tokyo, my roommate and I went to bed early. We weren’t adjusted to the time difference yet, and so around 7 PM we’d get sleepy, and couldn’t fight it past 9 PM. But in the middle of the night I awoke strangely. In my mind, I had a vision of someone creeping into our bedroom and opening our bags, tossing things about. I was to tired to get up so half heartedly said “NO! Go Away!” waking my roommate up. I said I thought I heard a man in our room, she sighed and said I was dreaming. We just went back to sleep.
The next morning, our bags and things were slightly scattered about. But the dream of the man in the room had faded so each one of us just thought the other hadn’t been careful of the other’s belongings. But when we got to breakfast, one of the guys in our exchange group was talking every animated. “Did you guys feel the earthquake last night! I was so scary!” Our male chaperone was very tired and had a look of “not this again.” No we all said, we hadn’t felt it. The male chaperone finally said “No, he just had a bad dream, and jumped into bed with me because of it!” But the kid was now mad. “No! No it was a real earthquake! I was thrown out of bed into yours!”
Just as the chaperone was about to say how this was impossible, I spoke up and mentioned my dream about the man and our bags. It suddenly struck me! It must have been the earthquake tossing our bags around! But why had the rest of us not woken up?
And then it struck us. We had giggled and laughed a few days earlier while we had explored our hotel rooms. Everything in the room was nailed down. The phone, the alarm clock, lamps, beds, chairs, etc. Everything was fixed firmly into place. But that kid? He was in a roller bed! And had forgotten to lock the wheels! Finally the chaperone agreed, that yes the kid hadn’t jumped into his bed, but had instead been tossed onto it from the relatively minor earthquake. That afternoon when we arrived in Chino, our host families confirmed that there indeed was an earthquake, and that kid enjoyed retelling his story over and over again.
Travel Missteps is an every-other week series on how sometimes part of the journey is making mistakes and getting lost.
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