Jan 22, 2011

A new walk around the neighborhood 02


This is construction on Route 4, the Sendai bypass. Almost all work on the roads here takes place during the day, even during rush hours. The main reason is consideration of the schedule of the people working on the roads and the inconvenience to the neighbors who might be disturbed by noise at any other time.After crossing the bridge and turning off the bypass, I went by another of those curvilinear streams, or maybe it would be less poetic but more accurate to call them drainage ditches.
Notice the word "self" in English; it is also written twice in katakana. It means 'self service' and shows one of the word construction patterns in Japanese. When combining or shortening terms, only the first part is used. If. This means that the term 'personal computer' or 'pasocon', where 'paso' is the first part of the Japanese renditioning of 'personal' and 'con' is the first part of 'computer'. So, when shortening 'self service', the first word has only one part and the second word is dropped because it is not needed.
This is a 'tabehodai yakiniku' restaurant. A yakiniku restaurant is one where you have a grill (electric, gas, or charcoal) and the main course is meat that you cook yourself. The 'tabehodai' part of the name indicates that you can eat as much as you want for a fixed price. In this case, the food is 2,480 yen (about US$30). There is usually a one and a half or two hour time limit. Also, these places usually have 'nomihodai' which means that the drinks, including beer, wine, sake, and some mixed drinks have a fixed price for all you can drink. There is something special about this restaurant for me, but I will wait until my next post to explain what it is.

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