Home again

 This large hospital has rice paddies right up to one of the walls. Rice paddies are usually home to a variety of small animals, including snakes, so I have often wondered if a patient has ever found a snake in their room.

 This is a vegetable market where all of the products are labeled with the name and address of the farmer who produced it. When we had a car, we frequently shopped here, but now it is a bit far, a long way to carry things home, so we do not use it as much.

 Arriving home again I found that they had done some repair work on our administrative building. Notice the low step from the sidewalk up to the entrance way. All of these tiles fell off during the quakes when the sidewalk sunk. It used to come up to the bricks on the wall, but now it is quite a bit lower. You can also see the damage to the the ends of the stairs from the sidewalk down to the open area which is covered with red bricks.

This is a close up of the repairs. Before the quakes there was no step here. The metal drainpipe  is badly twisted but it is hard to see in this picture. Notice the long crack. Almost everywhere there was a hole or other weak spot in a surface, that surface cracked.