Mostly going to and from my art class

 This is a statue in front of the classroom buildings at Miyagi Gakuin U. It is by one a famous sculpture from Sendai, Churyo Sato.

 On Saturday morning I started out for downtown Sendai and my biweekly art class. I was surprised to find that the doors to our local shrine were open. Usually they are closed and secured with a large padlock. I later realized that they were open because the shrine keepers where preparing for our neighborhood festival in honor of the river god.

 At the construction site by the bridge, trucks were bringing in loads of dirt from some other place and that was being placed in the large bags that are used like sandbags to build temporary walls.

 At Kotodaikoen, the subway stop nearest my class, the station is far underground and, although there are stairs, almost everyone takes this long escalator.

 I found that another festival was beginning. I also discovered that I wrongly named the festival I showed a couple of weeks ago. I said that it was the Tanabata Festival, but I was wrong, it was something else. This is the real Tanabata Festival. You can tell because the arcade that runs all the way to Sendai Station is hung with decorations.

The walkway in the divider that separates the two lanes of traffic on Josenji Dori, the main street in this area, was decorated with thousands of messages about the earthquake and tsunami. There were many that contained the usual Gambare Someplace, but there were many that seemed to have messages to those who perished.