Sunday, March 13, 2011

SOS Japan


SOS Japan
For the last couple of weeks my students in 1º "Bachillerato" have been learning vocabulary about natural disasters and rescue work. Most books I can think of which are meant for "Bachillerato" students have a lesson about this. Now I know why: every year we face earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes..., you name it, somewhere in our world and, certainly, the vocabulary you learn about it is likely to come in handy sooner or later. I must admit, though, that the earthquake and the tsunami in Japan left me in a state of shock. I can´t forget the first images we saw about it in our classes last Friday. This is the video we saw:



You can follow the aftermath of the earthquake in Japan live through NHK World (thanks to my friend "Erelea" for the hint). As for images of the disaster, I think the best ones are those in "The Big Picture": Earthquake afermath and Massive earthquake hits Japan. The CNN has a very good series of photos of different places affected by the tsunami which shows them before and after the destruction; move the scroller slowly from left to right to see the change.

Those of you interested in knowing how the Japanese are trying to avoid meltdowns af the nuclear reactors, click here

In order to get a little closer to the Japanese way of life, let me share with you this video which explains the way to find an address in a Japanese city; it has nothing to do with our notion of streets and numbers: it looks weird  and very difficult to understand from our point of view, and, sure, it works the other way round (i.e., the Japanese must find it hard to get their whereabouts in any city in Europe)

This is one of those videos with audio in English but subtitles in lots of languages; of course, I recommend the English ones but you may try in other languages until you fully understand it. Click here if you want to read the transcript



6 comments:

  1. carla serrano15 March, 2011

    Me neither, teacher, I can't forget these images... I can't imagine the suffer of all this people, I can't believe the tremendous disaster that was happened. Because this is not something that, ok, it happened and in two days forgotten, is a country, the country with most people of all the world, a country that now is destroyed and that will take a lot of years to be recovered. And I'm also thinking that maybe we are living a historical moment because, what will happen if we can't control the nuclear energy? if in Japan they can't fix the problem, we'll take out all the nuclear centrals that we have, and our form of life will change with it. And to finish, I think, within that this is very bad and very painful for the people from Japan and from all of us, I think could be worse if this natural desaster took place in other country not prepared like Japan is.

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  2. Carla, I totally agree with you. I am afraid the date of March 11th will stay in our minds for a long time - for the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, of course, but we shouldn´t forget it is also the anniversary of the terrorist bombings in the trains in Madrid

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  3. carla serrano16 March, 2011

    Today when I saw te news, I was thinking that we are living in Japan the same that happened in Chernobyl, but slowly motion. We are watching what happends, experimenting with this nuclear central, and I'm very sad because why is always in tis asiatic country? They suffered the atomic bomb and now this... Poor people.

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  4. Carla, you are right: Chernobyl suffered a sudden meltdown and explosion but in Japan we can see what is happening... I really do not know what is better or worse.

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  5. Óscar Pallín Arias19 March, 2011

    I`m suprised the behavior of the japaneses, they don´t leave their conutry, somebody change the north to the south. Some spanish also remain in Japan, in spite of their families ask them who retourn to Spain with their new family, but they want not to retourn. They have a strict behavior.

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  6. Óscar, I guess it must be very difficult to decide whether to stay or to leave...

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