Shinrin Park, Miyagi Gakuin U, and the riverside

 A while back I showed pictures of some banners advertising the Firefly Festival in Shinrin Park, where Ian and I walk. This is one of the pools where the fireflies hatch.

 The walking path climbs a hillside beside the firefly homestead, so we can look down on it. At this point the water is between two raised wooden walkways and is almost completely hidden by the weeds.

 This is a little later, after Ian and I had coffee and donuts at Mr Donut and I had arrived by bus at Miyagi Gakuin U. The hall that runs the length of the first floor of the main classroom building is now unlit, except for natural light from the windows. This is part of the effort to decrease the consumption of electricity to make up for the shortfalls due to tsunami and earthquake damage.

 The guerrilla rains of yesterday washed away a lot of the dirt that the construction along the riverside has moved. The hole on the right was big enough to standing.

 I usually cross the river on the east side of the bridge. The intersection at the end of the bridge is one of those new Sendai ideas to slow down pedestrians. The zebra crossings only go across three of the four sides. So when I come up from the riverside, to cross the road I have to wait for the light to walk north and then I have to wait for a full cycle (more than 3 minutes) to go west, before I can start south toward Yaotome. Needless to say I almost never do this, but today I was early and I had not seen the area on the west side of the bridge for a long time. There is a stream that enters the river just to the right of this picture and flows behind the power shovels. It is the same stream where they built a temporary road to repair the collapsed banking. They stabilized it have yet to fix it. The power shovels were being used to move the concrete blocks that they had removed from the banking at the construction site to the east of the bridge and shown in the second picture above.

The concrete blocks have been neatly placed in piles of 5 x5x4, or 100 blocks to the pile. There area about 6,000 blocks altogether. I assume that when the landscaping work is finished they are going to use the blocks to resurface the slope beside the river.