Dear Elliot, Emmala, and Eliza,

Today we visited a very interesting library in Sendai. Sendai is a big city with over a million people. The city library is part of a beautiful steel and glass building that is called the Sendai Mediatheque. The building also houses performance spaces, galleries for art, recording studios and places to make videos. There are two floors dedicated to the library. You would have liked some of the fun furniture for the readers at the library. On one floor, everything is curved. The tables where the computers are are all round and there are round tables for readers. Even the shelves that hold the books are curved.

Here is a picture of a very interesting piece of furniture. It is made for people to sit or to lie down while reading a book. If you sat on this, where would you like to be?

This building survived the strongest earthquake ever recorded in Japan. Some of the glass broke and there was a little bit of other damage, but the structure of the building remained strong even though it was a really big earthquake. When people visit the building, they can take elevators, escalators or stairs to get between the floors. Since we were visiting, we tried all three ways of going up and down.

We took a bus tour all around Sendai to see the city and enjoyed seeing the University, museums, the ruins of a castle and other special places in the city. In the afternoon we took the fast train - the shinkansen - back to Hachinohe and from there a small train to get to Masawa. We will be staying with Rachel and Mike for a few days now.

It is raining here in MIsawa. It is the first rainy weather we have had. And today is the 4th of July. There is a special party and fireworks for this evening, but there were almost no people out in the rain to celebrate. Maybe it will stop raining before the fireworks.