In downtown Sendai

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and that the next year will be all that you hope it will be.

I have found a four week teaching job in Niigata Prefecture, over on the west coast, so I will be there for the month of February. Later this week, I will check my netbook computer and verify that I can continue blogging from the campus there. If not, I am sure that I can work out something. It should be interesting as I will be teaching only three hours a day and will have weekends free. The area has large amounts of snow but I should be able to do some exploring, and picture taking too.

 As I was leaving Miyagi Gakuin U at about 5 p.m., the Christmas lights on the steeple were on for the first time.

 The fire station was lit up as I passed and one of the trucks was out in the yard.

 The next morning on my way back to Miyagi Gakuin U, I noticed this bus at the Asahigaoka station. Strawberry Cones is an ice cream and pizza shop that specializes in home delivery. I believe they started out as an ice cream shop, which explains the name. They are famous for the strange pizzas that they sell, the toppings can be truly exotic.

 After my class I took a bus downtown and then walked along the arcade. There were a few people about but the stores had barely opened when I arrived. Also it was a Thursday, not the busiest day of the week.

 I stopped at this Starbucks for a coffee. It was not busy and the waitresses were very friendly, chatting me up once they discovered that I understood Japanese.

 A lot of the stores in the arcade have open fronts like this, where they sell stuff right out in the open (under the arcade roof, of course). Notice the sign that says We love Sendai in a mixture of English and Japanese.

 There are lots of bicycles but even more cars and trucks.

 This is one of the construction sites for the new subway line. It is going to run under the road and this part will go out to the west, eventually ending at the hill top campus of Tohoku U, the national university.

This bus, that looks like a trolly, is called the Loople and it travels in a big loop around the city. It is cheaper than the regular buses and is getting used more and more.