Finally leaving the park

 These flowers were interesting because the stems were covered with something that looked like white moss.

 These flowers were on a small tree, or maybe it is a large bush.

 This is the overall picture of the tree/bush. The top was a little taller than my head.

 I really have to learn to keep my finger away from the lens. The problem is that the best way to hold the camera to keep it steady is to have your finger very near the lens. If I concentrate on framing the picture, I sometimes forget about my finger. When I first worked at Miyagi University I lived on the second floor on the far end of this apartment complex. After two years we bought our 'mansion' and moved out.

 This is between the park and my dentist, a distance that is less than half a kilometer. The round part of the sign states that it is a Miyagi Kotsu bus stop and gives the name, takamori gochome kita. The rectangular section at the bottom gives the arrival times for the buses. There are about three an hour.  The strange looking part in the middle is a light with a battery and solar panels. The panels collect enough light during the day to power the light until after the buses stop at night.

On my way home I walk through a housing area that has very large, by Japanese standards, western looking homes. I particular like this one, although now that I am retired our 'mansion', condo apartment, is more convenient.

More from the park

 Telephone booths are very unusual these day. Everyone has a cell phone so the public phones have rapidly disappeared.

 The slot at the right top allows you to deposit coins. The large horizontal slot in the middle is for a pre-paid card. And the red button at bottom connects directly to emergency services without requiring any money.

 I found some exercise equipment. This is for moving your hips back and forth while holding the rails. The blue sign on the post shows how to use this.

 Here are some of the other pieces of equipment. Then nearer one is for stair climbing and the far one is used by putting your legs on this side and then hanging over backwards on the other.

 This is an example of how to use that last ladder-like thing.

This one was interesting. You are supposed to walk through it. The floor has various built-in patterns that stimulate the bottoms of your feet. I could feel them even through the thick soles of my walking shoes.

More from Takamori Higashi Koen

 Tucked away in one corner of the park there is a children's play area.

 This is something that is almost never seen in Japan, a public basketball court. Kids do not hang around outdoors here. They have school and then school clubs or prep school until nearly dark. Then they have lots of homework. Just looking at the court makes it obvious that people here do not play much basketball. The court is round.

 This is an outside wall of the public restroom. I was surprised by the triple projects and the way the plane of the wall has been broken up.

 Some of the flowers were in full bloom.

 At one corner of the park there are electric meters but the cable goes underground so I could not determine what was using the electricity. I guess that it must be lights in the restroom but I could not see any.

Still in the park

 The new path through the woods is a pleasure to walk on.

 Instead of using concrete to protect the uphill side of the path, they constructed it with old fashion methods, bundles of small branches held in place with sticks driven into the ground. This type of construction gradually becomes part of the landscape and will last many years.

 This is looking toward the point where I entered the park. The building is a school for the handicapped.

 When I saw these trees, all I could think of was Christmas. When I lived in this area, they were not much taller than I am.

 I finally found the name of the park. The bushes are trimmed to become kana and read takamori higashi koen, takamori is the place name meaning tall forest, higashi means east and koen is park.

This sign shows pictures of all the wild birds that make their homes or pass through the park. It also has a nice picture of my finger.

More from the park

 The sign on the tripod says that this is a stage for musicians or actors. I wonder if anyone has ever used it.

 The sign says that the wooden platform is for viewing water lilies. Of course, at this time of year there aren't any and I decided that I would not wait to see them, so I moved on.

 A little further on I found this nice little garden, but again it was too early for most of the flowers.

 This old wooden bridge crosses an inlet where the drainage water from the surrounding area enters the pond.

 By the time I got to the rest area, the people who had previously been there had moved on, but a young man was fishing.

About 15 years ago, I lived near by for a couple of years. At that time this park was very rough. The path on the right was the only way to walk through this area. However, over the past few years, they have done a lot of work on the park. The path on the left is one the results of this construction.

Off to the dentist's

 To get to my dentist's office in Parktown, I usually walk to Izumi Chuo and then take a bus. Sometimes I walk. It takes just under an hour. On this day I decided on the bus and as I walked to the depot, I saw the gateball players again. Everyone things of gateball as a game for old people and that is the image that I have. However, every once in a while I remember that I am already older than many of the players.

 At Izumi Chuo, I stopped for coffee at Starbucks and took this picture of the pyramid over the stairs leading down to the bus depot.

 I went over to the station building to use the public toilets before getting on the bus and found a large group of women, what my wife and I call "young mothers", women who are in the late 20s or 30s and usually have young children. I never did figure out what was going on. The tables held small packets of various kinds of food and what looked like jewelry and trinkets. While I was standing there, a long line formed behind the woman in the white sweater(?). Most of the women seemed to know each other. It was all very strange.

 My dental appointment was for 2:30 in the afternoon, so I had lunch at the little shopping center nearby. The place is actually a bread shop but they have an all you can eat lunch for 850 yen. There were five or six varieties of bread, two soups, salad fixings, five or six vegetables, spaghetti, rice, and three deserts. It was very good. I particularly liked it because I was able to fill up on vegetables. I am not a vegetarian but I do not eat much meat, no  beef at all. After I ate I walked across the street to a little public park. This was the flight of stairs leading down into the park.

 The park is centered on a small pond. I sat at the picnic bench and drew a couple of pictures of the little structure in the distance.

There were a couple of people sitting on the bench under the roof of the structure.

Still headed for Izumi Chuo

 The last time I came by there this building contained a restaurant specializing in yakiniku. At a yakiniku restaurant they bring plates of raw meat and vegetables to your table and you cook them yourself on a grill that is usually gas and embedded in the table. Now it is called Earth Support and is a center for home helpers, people who go to homes to assist the elderly and the sick.

Down the street there is a gas station, where regular gas was selling for 149 yen per liter, or US$ 6.88 a gallon. Since the disaster, the supply chain for gas has been restored and there are no longer any shortages, at least in Sendai. I do not know what the situation is like in the areas destroyed by the tsunami.

A little closer to Izumi Chuo, I saw a woman working in a rice paddy. She was planting rice in the spots that had been missed by the automatic planter.

The paddy is fairly big by Japanese standards. You can see the gas station in the distance on the right. Rice paddies are generally pretty small and there are absolutely no huge operations like you find in California or some other parts of the US. After WW2, Japan limited the size of farms to insure that everyone would be able to support themselves. I believe that a nuclear family was limited to 2 1/2 acres, but I could be wrong. There has been some relaxation of the laws and people can and do rent paddies, but the farms are still relatively small.

Turning and looking across the street, you can see a large hospital. This is the one that I went to when I had a kidney stone attack and they refused to see me because it was early morning and the one doctor on duty was already waiting for an ambulance that was bringing an emergency patient.

I was now in the built up area to the west of the Izumi Chuo subway station. The content of this imitation brick (real bricks collapse in earthquakes so they are seldom used) building is actually quite unusual. The building contains a coffee shop called Kenzo. Compared to Nagoya there are very few coffee shops in Sendai. That is one of the reasons that I like Starbucks so much. There are a number of shops in places that I commonly go and I like the coffee.

This place, with the red and yellow flags in front of it, is a curry shop. It is part of a chain that is cheap but good tasting. On TV I have seen blind taste tests where people have chosen this curry over real Indian curry. Since it is on the west side of the station, I never seem to remember it when I eat in Izumi Chuo. I really should keep it in mind.

This truck is a Coop truck, the Coop being the supermarket that I show a couple of days ago. The woman in the yellow T-shirt is delivering orders to the people who live in the apartment house whose shadow you can see on the sidewalk. The man in the helmet is a delivery person who came on a motorcycle that is out of the picture. As I walked up the two were talking so I assumed that they knew each other.

Still returning from Parktown

 Instead of going up over the hill and approaching Izumi Chuo from the north like I usually do, I decided to turn right and go down the hill and then approach from the west. I had not been on this road for a long time so it was an interesting walk.

On the way down the hill, near the athletic dome that I showed a few days ago, I found a ramen shop with this picture on the outside of the entrance. The writing is a poem-like composition about how ramen tastes and smells as you slurp down the noodles and the hot soup passes over your tongue and goes down your throat.

When we had a car, we came here quit often, but I have not been here for at least two years. This is a parcel delivery service office. In Japanese the service is called takkyubin. Now that we do not have a convenient way to get here we have the service come to the house to pick up packages. It costs a bit more but is better.

This area used to be a large open field with some woods at the back. A few years ago they cut down all the trees and flattened the land. Now they have built a shopping center.

This picturesque driveway came right out to the main street. I took this picture from the sidewalk. The house at the end was nothing special, just a regular old, cheap building of the type that was built when this area was first opened up for housing.

A little bit further down the road was the rice producer's cooperative. The building on the left is the first of three large temperature controlled storage structures for the rice grown in the area. The building on the right seems to be an administrative space. The wall-less structure in the middle is a store that is only open for a period of a few months around the harvest.

This stele is tucked in the woods beside the coop's land. It is in honor of the Japaneses war dead. Notice that someone has placed fresh flowers on it.

Behind the above stele there is a similar one but even further into the woods.

As I was walking back out of the woods, I noticed that fuji, wisteria, was growing in the trees. It was just past its prime but was still very pretty.