Rain Hike

I met up with friends this morning to go hiking on Aoba-Yama, a smallish hill just outside the city centre. Naturally, it started to pour rain just as we got to Sendai Station to take the bus. It turns out that woods will offer a certain amount of protection from the rain, but not as much as you might wish, and that hiking with umbrellas looks as silly as it sounds.

Despite the rain, it felt really good to get outside the city (even just by a few miles) and see some of the nature and the trees for which Sendai is famed. The trail wound around the hill once and up and down to varying degrees a few times, necessitating the use of wooden steps installed by the city. Between that and wandering down side trails several times, we also saw a waterfall and some truly lovely streams. The rain also served to keep away the mosquitoes and bring out an astonishing range of frogs in many colours. Sadly, it did not scare away the spiders, who were out in full force and are huge in this part of the world. The largest we saw was at least an inch long and one of several on a particular section of trail that Erica dubbed ''Wildlife Staircase.''

This past week has been Sendai Orientation, which covered a lot of the same topics as the orientation in Tokyo but tried to keep the information specific to Sendai. It also involved several more handbooks and many, many more sheets of paper to add to my already massive collection. I swear, I will have to plant trees for the rest of my life to make up for the environmental damage done by the publication of handbooks now sitting on my bookshelf.

Orientation also introduced us to the Sendai International Centre, where I am now and of which I am a huge fan. They have free internet access, a library of English books and magazines and a lounge in which to read them, a bulletin board of language partners and stuff for sale, and a English-speaking staff who can answer just about any question you have about Sendai. I need to learn how to get here on a bicycle. I'll bet they can tell me.

We also learned about earthquakes, as in how to prepare your apartment so that you don't die when a bookcase falls on you and as in the fact that Sendai is ''due'' for a ''major'' quake pretty much any time now. This was quite worrying at first, but then I realized that a.) my apartment has basically nothing in it that can fall on me, and b.) I am more likely to be shot in the street in America than I am to die in an earthquake in Japan. It's all about putting it into perspective, my friends.