The Life of a White Gurl.: Japan.

This is just for school so y'all don't needa read thiiis.

The 2011 earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tōhoku had a magnitude of 9.0 It was the most powerful known earthquake ever to have hit Japan, and the fifth most powerful earthquake in the world since modern record-keeping began in 1900.

The earthquake we had in Gisborne in 2007 had a magnitude of 6.8

there was a total amount of 401 aftershocks. 401 little earthquakes after that earthquake.

On 12 September 2012, a Japanese National Police Agency report confirmed just under 16,000 deaths, 6,142 injured, and just under 3,00 people missing, as well as 130,000, buildings totally collapsed, with a further 254,000 buildings 'half collapsed', and another 691,766 buildings partially damaged. Thats a lot of people without shelter.

Now that we know about what happened and what i went to go learn about here's what i did!

I went to Japan because i won a scholarship there were 66 New Zealand students who were able to be accepted and i was one of them.. Overall there were 800 student who had the same oportunity as me. 800 students from fourteen different countrys.

All the New Zealand students met up in Auckland. it was pretty scary not knowing any of those people but it was fun getting to know them. We had a 12 hour plane ride to get to Tokyo where we stayed in a really flash motel

All 800 of the students involved got split up to go to different places in Japan. I went to a place called Fukushima, a place that had been affected by the earthquake and radiation. there were 110 of us. we attended lots of lecture by people who had been affected by the earhquake telling us what they were doing to help things get better. I met lots of really cool people from Australia, Brunei, India, Singapore and the Philippines. when we didnt have lectures we would just go out in the snow or get to know everyone.

We spent three days at the hotel in Fukushima then got divided into even smaller groups to go to home stays. i stay with a very nice japanese family who couldnt speak very good english but they tried very hard, my host-sister who was the same age as me could speak english well which was good. they taught me about what they did in their everyday lives and just little things they did. i went to school and it was very different to our school. they had elevators because it was six stories high!! we didnt get to spend much time at school though.

we went to a samurai museum and got to dress up in traditional clothing.

It snowed a lot! my host family took me to a very famous dinosaur museum.

This is the bullet train, the Japanese call it the Shinkansen. it can go as fast as 230 km/h. i had to travel on this from Tokyo to Fukushima. it's very efficient and you have exactly one minute to get on and off the train.