Disaster Prevention Museum!

Wow been too tired to update blog so don't really know where to start.

Zerfore! I shall begin at the coolest place!

(Just updated older blog posts: fixed formatting a little, added tags and most importantly, finally uploaded them photos from my phone! So photos from this post are going to be awesome, when I get them off of Sue who had the camera).

So Saturday, some volunteers who help foreigners with a million things (more on that later) took us new students to the Sapporo Disaster Prevention Museum! Yes there exists such a thing here!

And it is cool as frikkin hell! Okai so we were the only ones above 10 years of age there, but still AMAZING! Haha.

So you walk in, and are greeted by a big ass red firefighting truck! You can climb in the driver's seat, listen to the radio (actual one, no speaking though lol), and even turn on the siren. So far so frikkin nice!

Second thing we did was fire extinguisher practice! Basically we go into a sealed room with a big monitor (no real fire :(( ). The fire extinguishers are filled with water not powder or CO2, but it's still like the real thing. So basically we had this training in scouts (with real fire kk thx), so nothing really new there, but still, the monitor displays a fire, so you have to yell FIRE!!! and run get your extinguisher from the back, carry it the correct way, pop the safety, and spray away! The monitor has sensors on it so the fire reacts to the water spraying!

Of course if Richard was there he'd just drop his pants, pee on it and flood the entire museum (kif Avak? :P).

Second training was how to escape a building filled with smoke. So the actual drill takes place in a 2-story maze! Filled with [harmless but yukkie-smelling] gaz. So basically you stay low, keep your hand on the wall and try to get the hell out of there!

PS: you should descend stairs backwards!

PPS: I swear I grabbed her [the girl in front of me]'s ass by mistake! The smoke.. it was everywhere...

Phiew, out of the smoke and on to the next drill. EARTHQUAKE practice! Now ready to face Whitebeard (or Blackbeard for that matter). You get into this room that is on a platform. There's a table, 4 chairs around it, a cupboard, oven, sink, water boiler, fridge and door in the back.

Now before you get onto the platform, you get to choose the strength of the earthquake you will experience, anywhere between 2 to 7!!! degrees on the Richter scale. We chose 7 of course...

So you sit down, pretend to be having a conversation with your friends, and boom. There is no way you can keep standing on your feet with a 7-degree earthquake. I was lucky I was near the sink, so I could hold the sink and table and not get thrown off my feet lol. The others weren't so fortunate.

So you grab a cushion, and jump under the table until the shaking subsides, after which we need to turn off the gas and the boiler to prevent a fire, open the door, steady it with a chair so it doesn't slam you on the head if the shaking begins again and you're done.

Easier said than done haha. Fun stuff!

After that was a silly 3D movie about all we did, don't worry though! Thankfully Sapporo is one of the safest places to be disaster-wise, or so they told us so that we don't get worried hehe.

On our way out, we all donned real firefighter costumes (well the helmet and jacket only), they are really heavy by the way hehe, and took photos in front of/inside the truck!

After that, we went to the Sapporo International Communication Plaza Foundation, which is the headquarters for the volunteers who organized the whole trip. Really cool place. Really cool people. Basically, they're all Japanese people that speak other languages, and they help us foreigners with any issues we might need translation in, like medical examinations, bills, so on and so forth.

They also organize conversation groups among foreigners and citizens, so that they can all learn each other's languages. Cool place.

Finally time for dinner. I will let the photos speak... (more to come when I get the photos!)