Earthquake Diary 33

 A bit strange but barber shops were the first general class of shops to open. One service that many of them gave was a shampoo without the need for a haircut. Some of the shops were pricing shampoos as low as 300 yen. This was a real service since at the time most houses did not have water or the utilities to heat water.

 I showed this slope in a blog a while before the quake. It was the place where the word shogen  the name of the area, is spelled out in trimmed bushes. At the top of the hill is a school baseball field. Now it is one of seven designated places for bringing trash. Many house are full of broken furniture and other large items (broken TVs and computers, for example) that you can not put in the regular trash. These seven locations we set up to help people get their homes in order again.

 This is a long line of cars and trucks waiting to get into the temporary dump.

 This while car is the last in line for a gas station that is more than a kilometer away.

 A damaged house where someone has covered the roof with a plastic tarp to keep out the expected rain.

 This young man is standing in the line for the gas station. He is carrying a small red gas tank and is playing a game on his cell phone.

 When I reached Izumi Chuo I found that there were taxis again, even though the station building (on the right) is closed because of damage.

I was very surprised to discover that  work was being done on a new building. This is going to be a bank and behind it there is a four story building that will have shops on the first floor and rent-by-the-month apartments on the upper three.