Birds and other stuff

 This is my Thursday night class at Tohoku Gakuin U. There are actually five students but one was absent. This semester I am spending the first thirty minutes talking about the evening's subject and then the students talk among themselves about the same subject. They are not limited to that subject and often wander off into areas that are of interest to them. The idea is that a language student learns to talk by talking, speaking about their own ideas using the language that is already in their head.

 This ad was in the subway. It shows why there will be jobs for native speaking English teachers for a long, long time in Japan. Look at the left end of the ad. The text says, "Let's!". Most Japanese, in spite of six or more years of studying English, think that "let's" is a verb, so you hear and see things like "Let's sports". This ad by the way is trying to get new students for the Tohoku Seikatsu Bunka University's high school.

 The view as I walk along the level on my way home at night.

 Here you can see the reflections in the river. My new camera is amazing. I have never been able to get a decent night scene before. Now I can get this quality picture, hand-held.

 Early on Thursday morning, I was on my way to school and this crane was fishing for its breakfast.

 A little further down the river, this crane was resting. Presumably it had finished breakfast. I was happy for the cranes but a bit sad for the fish that became the meals.

This is the same crane as above, but with this wider view you can see the crow that is sitting on the rocks at the left.

Odds and ends

 Almost back to Izumi Chuo, I pass a pet hospital. It is one of the more interesting buildings in the area.

 The buses used to stop next to the station but drivers waited in the same place to pick up people from the subway, so there as a lot of congestion. They solved the problem a few years ago by building a tunnel from the subway station to the next block north and then rebuilding the road so that there is  space for private cars as well as a bus stop. People still try to wait by the station, but they installed a metal fence so most people now use the official waiting area. These are rather stylish seats for people who are waiting to be picked up. The structures are stone but the seat itself is wood.

 This is an elevator down to the tunnel.

 The next day I went to Tohoku Gakuin U to teach and found students using the temporary stairs that allow them to bypass the place where the hillside collapsed.

 They were also working repairs to that hillside.

 At the little park at the intersection of the road to my apartment complex and the main east-west road a work crew was cutting the grass and trimming the trees and bushes. The building on the left is a public toilet and the one in the background is part of the shopping center.

 This is the newly completed pedestrian walkway at the Asahigaoka bus center.

A long stretch, about 200 meters, is covered with flowers that have either been planted there by the neighbors or have escaped from the gardens on the inland side of the levee.

More from the neighborhood around Tohoku Gakuin U, part 3

 This is a side street only a couple of hundred meters from the campus. The contrast of old low residential buildings to new multistory ferro-concrete structures is really striking in this area.

 Here is another example of this contrast. The tall building in the center is the back of one of the classroom buildings and in front of it, in the middle of the picture, is a two story wooden building containing apartments.

 This is that two story building up close. I was surprised by the overgrown yard but in spite of the wild vegetation, the building is obviously occupies..

 Reentering the campus through a gate I had never used before, I discovered a little Shinto shrine that was fenced off from the Christian university.

 I often drink a can of Coke Zero during my Thursday evening classes. When I looked at the can, I was extremely surprised to find, next to the white Coke bottle printed at the top of the can, the Japanese "Ganbarou Tohoku! Kokoru o hitotsu ni." The first part is the slogan that is all over the place but the second part is new. I have never seen it before. It is hard for me to translate because, as is often the case with slogans the verb has been omitted, but it means something like "Make hearts one".

The next morning as I was leaving for my classes, I saw the police all lined up and standing at attention. I am not sure what it was but it probably was the start of a new motorcycle driving skills class.

More from the neighborhood around Tohoku Gakuin U

 When I first looked at the brown building in the middle, I thought that it had lost a lot of the facing tiles during the earthquakes. Then I realized that it was made that way. The light area is a map of Tohoku.

 This convenience store was surprising. It is a Family Mart, one of the chains, but it has solar panels on the roof and there are enough of them that they probably supply nearly all of the electricity for the store.

 I walked by the back of some sort school and saw this statue in a stand of trees. The boy is reading a book as he carries a load of wood on his back. I think that this illustrates some famous story but I do not know what.

 This building was extremely strange looking. I do not know what the walls are made from but they look like they are rusty.

 I walk around the corner and discovered the parking lot for the school. This statue was just inside the gate.

I noticed more solar panels on the top of a large building. There seems to be more of them in this area than in any other part of the city. I wonder if some professor at Tohoku Gakuin U is encouraging this as part of a research project. Of course, it may just be a coincidence.

The neighborhood around Tohoku Galuin U

 As I had some business at the admin office, I arrived at Tohoku Gakuin U very early for my last class. My problem was that I could not log on to the university's website, the place where I had to submit student grades. I suspected that it would take a long time to determine the problem so I got there about three hours before my class. I went directly to the admin office, where within minutes we discovered the problem. The password that I had copied down was wrong. I had an i where I should have had a j. So, to kill time, I decided to walk around the area, most of which I had never seen. This shop called Tsubasa, caught my attention because it has the same name as my grandson. After taking the picture, I walked up and looked in the window. The store sells model trains and accessories, mostly HO scale from the looks of things.

 I found the mix of building fascinating. Old wooden buildings were mix in with modern reinforced concrete structure, creating a very strange feeling. This old store sells gas heaters for baths.

 This old building houses a meat store.

 Whereas this new tile-faced building has a small grocery store on the first floor.

Just down the street is a building that used to be a public bath. When I first came to Japan, there were public baths in just about every neighborhood and most apartments did not have a bathroom, toilets, yes, but no bath. Around the back of this building, you can still see the large tank that held water for the baths. I could not be sure, but it looked like someone was living inside. The bath was definitely closed, though, and not that long ago because the paper sign was still legible.

I turned a corner and was back in modern downtown Sendai, tall buildings, lots of cars, and trees planted on the sidewalks and the lane divider.

Pictures from around my schools

 This is the wall that is replacing the old pedestrian bridge on the way to Yaotome. They built the wall and filled in the space behind it with dirt and stones.

 This is the statue of Kannon that is on the highest point in the area. I think the building next to it, a hotel, is about 10 stories high.

 This was taken from the bus between Miyagi Gakuin U and Asahigaoka. It is a pedestrian overpass but it has been completely covered and blocked off. I wonder whether they are going to repair it, replace it, or remove it.

 This is what was a building down the street from Tohoku Gakuin U. I do not remember how damaged it was but it is gone now.

 This is the supermarket across the street from Tohoku Gakuin U. It is where I buy my supper on Thursday nights. I eat in the teachers' lounge.

This is also across the street from Tohoku Gakuin U, but across a different street. Much of the facing on the second floor fell off and was replaced by sheets of plywood. The first floor is a ramen (noodle) shop that has remained open.

Odds and ends plus Tohoku Gakuin U campus

 This is a packaged wet towel of the kind that you often get in a restaurant to clean your hands before eating. The writing says "Ganbarou Nihon", which is hard to translate as I have pointed out but it might be "Hang in there! Japan!". You see ganbarou plus a place name in signs, posters, painted on walls, just about everywhere. They are to remind people that we are still struggling to recover from the disasters.

 This is the roof of the supermarket/department store, Seiyu,  next to our condo. They are now putting new air conditioning on the roof. The word from a person who works for Seiyu says that they are definitely reopening and fairly soon. It is now just a question of when the repairs can be finished and the store restocked. They are apparently having the same problem that many other places are having - a shortage of parts.

 This is the entrance road at Tohoku Gakuin U. I've shown these trees before, fiirst with no leaves, and then as they started to grow, and now that the new leaves are fully out.

 This is the garden that is on the other side of the road.

 That is not a rabbit. It is a bag of trash that someone tossed at the side of the walkway along the top of the levee near my apartment. This is one of the things that I definitely do not like about Japan. People tend to just drop wrappers, used bottles and that sort of thing. They often, as in this case, tie the stuff up neatly in the plastic bag that they were given when they bought it, but then they just drop the bag.

The repairs to the collapsed wall are nearing completion. The new fence is nearly finished and a little more is done on the garden each day. In the middle of the left edge of the picture, you can see a horizontal line. This is a couple of boards, resting on concrete blocks, that form a walkway from the yard to the levee top. There is a gate in the fence.  I am quite curious as to what the final construction will look like. There used to be a metal bridge, but it collapsed with the wall. I am not sure where the riverside public property ends and the private property of the land owner begins. That will make a difference in what he can do.

Photos from a Thursday

 This is the nicely manicured lawn at Miyagi Gakuin U. If you look very carefully you may be able to see the may who is trimming the hedges near the pond.

 This is the back of the bus driver's. The object is a strip of inscribed wood, wrapped in white paper and tied with a red string, an good luck charm from some Shinto shrine. From talking with various people, I have found that most people do not really believe in them, but feel bad if they do not  have them. I usually get one at New Years and carry it in my wallet for the rest of the year, burning it at the shrine the next year. I do not believe that it does anything, but being aware of it makes my mind function a bit differently, keeping me safe.

 I found these flowers growing along the levee walkway. I have no idea what they are and do not believe that I have ever seen them before. I suspect that they are escapees from a garden. The rich guy's wife has a in-the-building traditional tea room and she grows all sorts of exotic flowers in her yard to use in the tea ceremonies. These must have been involved in a jail break.

 This is the campus at Tohoku Gakuin U, where the repairs to earthquake damage are still going on. The lounge for part time teachers is on the second floor.

 This is looking to the left from the spot where I took the above picture. I teach at three campuses, Tohoku Gakuin U at Tsuchitoi (here) and at Izumi and the Miyagi Gakuin campus in between. All three are very different. This on is the most crowded and with the least vegetation.

Back home in the compound where I live. This is a small building that is used only for trash collection. We must buy plastic bags from the city to pay for the collection. You can see them piled inside. The bags are actually quite cheap but they do provide some income for the city that is proportional to the amount of trash produced by an individual. Regular trash, including garbage, is collected twice a week. Additionally there are periodically scheduled collections of plastics, paper, and large objects that will not fit in the bags.