Hello everyone! It's November! October went by way fast. Oh, and as of Friday, I've been out for 6 months. That's crazy... It's been a pretty good week here in Yamato though. To start with, Halloween was on Wednesday. This year for Halloween I was a missionary! I know, big suprise, right? Bet you didn't see that one coming. Halloween is actually a really interesting holiday in Japan. Everyone knows what it is, and you can buy Halloween decorations, candy, trick-or-treating bags, etc, but nobody actually knows what you do on Halloween, and nobody goes trick-or-treating. It's actually really funny. However, we did end up celebrating Halloween. Since Halloween was on Wednesday this year, and the weekly English Class we teach is on Wednesday, we had a halloween party after class. So I was able to put the box of Hallowen brownie mix that was included in my birthday package to good use. Everyone enjoyed them. I can't remember if I mentioned this to you all already, but since we don't have an oven I ended up improvising and cooking the brownies in the rice cooker. My Mom was slightly suprised by the idea, but the idea wasn't really mine. I'd heard from other missionaries that you can bake cakes in the rice cooker. I figured brownies and cakes are fairly similar, so it should still work, right? turns out it does. You just have to run the rice cooker through 5 or 6 cycles, and it takes a couple hours.
Friday night Jun came to sports night. I usually sit on the side and chat with the members and investigators, since sports night is actually code for basketball night. Jun made a comment that he wanted to see my play, so this time I brought my stuff and actually played a few games. It was pretty fun, but I still don't like basketball all that much more than I did before. What was really good about sports night though, is that one of our investigators who we haven't seen for a while ended up going, so we were able to talk with him a little bit. After sports night we went on splits with the Zone Leaders. I went back to Yamato with Elder Jones, and Elder Nakamura went to Fujisawa with Elder Fuller. We both ended up learning alot, and it was a really good day for the both of us. Elder Jones is a fantastic missionary.
Sunday ended up being fairly interesting. We were temporarily made into a trio for the day. Elder Call, a first transfer missionary, came to Yamato and stayed with us Saturday night through Monday morning while his companion Elder Vandegraff went to Sendai with another Elder Watanabe (a Senior Missionary) for a baptism. I was really curious as to why a missionary would be going all the way to Sendai (a 6 hour bus ride) for a baptism, so I asked about the story behind this guy being baptized. It's actually really cool. Elder Vandegraff found this guy about 6 months ago in Tokyo. He said that he actually lives in Sendai, and was only in Tokyo for the day for business. He was willing to have a lesson on the spot, and said that he'd be coming back for a day the next week and wanted to meet again then. They did this once or twice, and then this guy told them that he would only be coming back to Tokyo one more time, so he wanted them to teach him everything. At the time, Elder Vandegraff and his companion were still pretty young missionaries, and didn't speak Japanese that well, so they needed some help. The gave Elder Watanabe a call, and asked if he could help teach this guy. The next week rolled around, and they spent pretty much all morning and a bit of the afternoon teaching this guy all the lessons. Now here we are, six months later, and this guy is getting baptized. Crazy.
Those are most of the highlights from the week. I've gotta get going. Elder Nakamura and I are going to Enoshima Island today. He's never been there before, so it should be fun!
Elder Blake
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