Things I saw on a work day

 Yesterday I showed the stuff that the workmen at the bookstore had left outside the door. In this picture you can see the workmen actually working. Although the store is open, you can move through the area around them. This bookstore is quite large; you can see how far it is to the wall. It is not quite as wide as it is long but it is big. There is a small section of English books and magazines at high, but not comparatively unreasonable, prices. It also contains a coffee shop that also sells cakes and sandwiches, a kind of cheap Starbucks.

 This is what used to be the figurine store. A work crew is removing the store name from the tower and repainting it.

 This is one of my favorite types of sweet snack. It is called dorayaki, written on the package in large black characters with a white background. Dora means cymbal and yaki means to fry or bake. Dorayaki is made from two pancake-like cakes with a scoop of an, sweet bean paste, in between. Because the an is not spread around but remains thicker in the middle than at the edges, the two pancakes take on the shape of a pair of cymbals. Thus, dorayaki, or fried cymbals. The ballpoint pen gives a sense of the size.

 On Tuesdays I teach at Tohoku Gakuin U. My classroom is on the first floor and looks out on the back of the campus. The view is quite pleasing, lots of trees and plants. However, we can not open the windows because there are mosquitoes. A couple of weeks ago, it got so hot that the students opened the windows anyway and one poor young lady got four bites on her arm. The air conditioning is set at 28 degrees C by the office as part of the effort to reduce electricity usage in order to compensate for the damage done by the disaster.

 A few minutes after I took the above picture, we had what the Japanese call a guerrilla rainstorm. Extremely strong rain that comes down so hard and fast that the ground is unable to absorb it and temporary flooding occurs. Luckily by the time my classes were finished the rain had stopped and the water on the ground had drained away. So I was able to stay dry on my walk home.

This is the sidewalk on the main road near my home. There is a trellis that goes over the sidewalk and the flowering plant growing on it forms a tunnel that pedestrians and bicyclists pass through. On a hot summer day, it seems cooler as you go through it.