We drove through Aobadouri street to the Sendai International Center in Aoba-ku. We spotted max from the window almost right away when we drove to the parking lot. We ran inside to see him. We could see it from his face that he wasn’t expecting us and that he was really happy to see us. He had no idea that we were coming to see him. I thought it was kind of weirde, since the company had informed me that Max would be there.
He told us that he had stayed the night at school and that he had made new friends there. I remember him telling us about this one boy who was totally amazed that Max could speak so many languages. The next day apparently the shuttle bus had taken him finally home and he had stayed there for two days doing pretty much nothing at all. He had no idea how big the earthquake had been before he had come to the International Center. He had got reception at about 2 p.m., that was about 2 hours before the exchange student company contacted me. He had also heard that the German embassy was getting all the Germans out of Sendai and some other foreigners came to take the same bus. I was thinking that why hadn’t the dorm people taken Max with them? It must have been weird for him to be alone there with people he didn’t know at all.
We went to talk to this old lady who was the one arranging the bus rides from Sendai to Tokyo. I tried to explain to her with my Japanese skills that I had been promised a place on that bus by EF. Max explained to her in German who we were and where we were going, because she obviosly didn’t understand what I was saying. She wanted to see our passports and I said to her that I didn’t have my passport that I had left it at my house. She said to me that with no passport I was not getting on the bus. I started explaining that I still had my Gaijin Card (Japanese ID for foreigners) that wasn’t that enough? She said that she would need my passport. I was freaking out and I didn’t know what was going on anymore. Ayelet asked her if Tsitika, Chayse and Bill could ride the bus too and they handed their passports to her and she arranged everything so they would be able to ride the bus too.
I started crying and kept saying the words ”I can’t go home” all over again. Chayse and Tsitika were trying to comfort me but it didn’t help. One German girl came to ask if I was okay and Tsitika said to her in Japanese that I forgot my passport. I said to Tsitika that the German girl can speak English so why was she speaking Japanese? Chayse started to laugh. The German girl said that surely there must be a way for me to get on the bus, that they weren’t just gonna leave us there.
Ayelet said with a loud voice something about contacting the Finnish embassy. Then one woman stood up and asked ”Who here was from Finland?”Ayelet pointed at me and the lady knelt in front of me. She asked what was my name in Finnish and I told her. It was really weird to speak Finnish after all that time. Well of course I had been talking with my mother in Finnish but not face to to face. It was kind of hard and I kept mixing some English words in my sentences.
The lady asked me when was the last time I was in contact with the Finnish embassy and I told her that never. I had never actually spoken to them because the company had arranged pretty much everything for me. She told her husband to call the Finnish Embassy right away. He handed me the phone and a lady answered it. I explained to her that they would not let me ride the bus and that I was told that the Finnish embassy and the German embassy had made a deal that I would get on that bus no matter what.
The lady told me that they are going to send a fax to the German embassy to request that I get on that bus. She told me to call the embassy after a while and gave me the number. I called my mother almost right away to explain to her what had happened and she told me to calm down about it and that the bus was not going to leave without me. If they had promised me a place on that bus they wouldn’t just leave me. I was underage afterall.
I went to talk to the Finnish lady who had helped me before. She told me that her husband was a university teacher in Sendai and they were wondering if they should have left Japan after the first earthquake on Wednesday but they waited too long and the when the earthquake on friday hit they wanted to go home immediately. As soon as they got reception they had called the Finnish embassy that they wanted to return and the embassy informed them about the German embassy bus leaving from the Sendai International center.
We were finally going to go home I thought. We decided to take a picture together so that our parents could see that we were waiting for the busses. Ayelet was going to post it on facebook. I found the Croatian flag, that Domagoj had given me before he left, in my bag so we took the picture with it for the Croatian JEC students to see that we were fine and we missed them. I was so happy that they didn’t have to experience all this.
We all got to talk with Ayano on the phone. As soon as I heard her voice I started crying. She was crying too, I could hear her voice shake. I didn’t want to say goodbye to her. Not like that. I loved Ayano like a sister and I wasn’t going to see her in a very long time. It was devastating, but I had to say my goodbyes to her. I told her that I loved her and that I would miss her very much. We had had plans that when I came back to Japan we would live all together, but now I was too scared to even think about moving back.
We also got a text message from Rika telling us goodbye and telling that she didn’t want us to go either. Chayse let us all write a short message to her with his phone. We were all kind of broken after everything that had happened and we needed to be together.
This was going to be the last bus ride together.
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