Dec 3, 2011

On my way to work

I was very surprised to see the black and white sign on the bus. It is an add for Amazon.com Japan, the place where I now buy most of my books. Actually most of the book I get are for my Kindle so I must buy them from the US site, but this was an ad for the Japanese site, which has lots of books in Japanese as well as English.
Another crane looking for breakfast. This time of year we see many of them along the river.
This was taken from the balcony next to our living room. It was very foggy as you can see.
On the hill nearest the Tohoku Gakuin U Izumi campus, this hill collapsed during the quakes. The road is one of the access routes to the high school run by the university and it is again open to traffic.
On this morning gardeners were cutting back the trees and bushes around our condo. I had to walk through the cuttings on the ground to get out to the path along the top of the levee.
I stopped in the middle of the bridge to take this picture. The structure on the right is the soccer stadium. Although it was cloudy, the mountains to the west were quite clear.
At the intersection nearest the Yaotome subway station, I found a large work crew putting scaffolding around an apartment building. They will repair damage from the quakes.
Since I was a little early, when I reached the Asahigaoka subway station, instead of going straight up and waiting in the bus depot, I went out to look at the park. I found a group of elderly (actually many of them looked younger than me) people warming up for a walk using ski poles. This is the latest fad here. The poles allow you to walk faster, because you can push with your arms. Also it gives your whole body a better workout than just walk. There is a potential problem, however. Many people who try this with out instruction manage to severely hurt themselves.

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