Back to normal - more or less

Things are finally getting back to something like normal. I started teaching again and the Friday, May 13, newspaper moved the TV schedule from the middle of the paper where it has been since the earthquake and placed it on the back page where it was before the disaster. The inside still contains lots of articles about the reconstruction, people's experiences during the disaster, the building death toll, the nuclear problem, and other related items.

 I walked to Izumi Chuo and on the way back took some back roads and found the building in the next picture. The ground has been cleaned up but the wall has not been repaired. This is probably because the companies that are available for this sort of work are all already working in other places, the insurance people have not yet had time to evaluated the damage, or the supplies are not available.

 A couple of buildings down the street and I found a building that was being held together with clear tape. I am sure that the same reasons for the lack or repair that I mentioned about apply here, too.

 I have shown this sushi restaurant a number of times. The last time the roof was covered with blue tarps that were starting to come off. Now, the roof has been completely repaired and the usual lunch time crowd has arrived.

 This is a little Shinto shrine near my condo. If you click on the picture, enlarging it, you can see that the ceramic piece on the end of the ridge pole is broken. I had not noticed this before and do not know whether it happened in the original quake, one of the immediate afterquakes, or gradually during the two months of minor quakes. (We had a small one about an hour ago, by the way.)

 This is the parking lot at the back of Seiyu, the supermarket next to my place. It appears that they are repairing the piping under the pavement. It also appears that they are working inside the middle, so maybe it will reopen after all.

 At another time, I walked to Izumi Chuo again and found that they had been working on the stairs leading from the bus depot to the Starbucks level.

As I said, I started teaching again after a three and a half month break. My first classes were at Tohoku Gakuin U. and I take a bus to get there.

My wife was in Tokyo helping out with a sick grandkid, so I stopped at this 7 / 11 and bought a lunch. The convenience stores have excellent lunches that are much cheaper than what you can make at home.

  I walked over to the bus shop and, while I waited, I noticed that work had finally started on this building. The parking is in front of the sushi restaurant I pictured above. This building has a computer shop on the first floor and a restaurant on the second. I sometimes stop at the computer shop, but I have never been to the restaurant.

 The bus arrived. Since it was the first day of class, I wanted to get there early. I have two classes and the first starts at 1:00. I usually get a 12:29 bus, but today I got one that came at 10:09.

 I arrive at the campus bus stop and walked up the hill to the where the classroom buildings and teachers' lounge are. At first everything looked fine. However, ...

 At the first building I found that the stairs that I usually take up to the quadrangle were blocked off because of the damage.

 The entrance to the building was also blocked.

 A large number of students were entering the Chapel, which was the next building. I was going to the building on the right. It contains the part time faculty lounge and my classroom is right across the hall. At this point everything looked normal. However, the quadrangle is actually L-shaped and when I reached a point where I could see down the other section, ...

I discovered that it was all dug up and still under reconstruction.