Hey everyone! I don't know if my sister put anything up last week
since I wasn't able to email home, but It's been quite the adventure so
far my first week in Japan! I'm currently in the Yamato ward of the
Fujisawa stake. We have a military base in our area, so we actually have
an english branch that we attend every sunday in addition to our
Japanese ward. My trainer is named Elder Christensen. He's already been
in the Yamato area for 12 weeks, and is pretty familiar with everything
going on here. There are some pretty neat people here that I've met so
far. I'm excited. Oh, and an interesting tidbit about our area: the
chapel we meet in is the same chapel they have a picture of in the
Japanese version of the Word of Wisdom Phamplet. Pretty cool, huh?
Elder Christensen is a pretty interesting guy. He's
from Salt Lake, likes to longboard, snowboard, his family used to travel
alot, and he's been out for about 13 transfers. He's pretty mellow, and
can be kinda quiet sometimes, but the members really seem to like him
alot, so he must know what he's doing. I hope I can learn alot from him.
The Yamato ward is fairly small geographically compared
to some of the other areas in the mission, but there are still plenty
of people, and it's still plenty big. Our apartment is about a 10 minute
ride away from the Yamato subway station which is pretty central to our
area. I was told on sunday that Yamato City has a population of about
300,000. Not too shabby. We have a handful of people we're teaching
right now, but we're still doing our fair share of street contacting
because they've all been fairly busy lately.
So my first full day was pretty exciting. Wendsday
morning we did some training with President Budge, got a crash course on
some basics of the mission from the office Couple, met our trainers,
had lunch, and then we were off to our areas. Every wednesday night we
teach english conversation classes as a community service project, which
means that my first day in the field I ended up teaching an english
class. That was fun. What's really funny is that all the lessons we've
taught so far have been to investigators that aren't Japanese, so
they've been in english. I have yet to teach a lesson in Japanese, and
I've been here a week. I've done plenty of street contacting in
Japanese, but haven't taught a lesson yet. Defintely not what I was
expecting.
My favorite thing about being in japan so
far is probably the city itself. It's always really interesting to be
riding around and see these really new modern buildings everywhere, and
then in the middle of nowhere there's just this stone wall that could be
hundreds of years old and you would never even know. The blend of
modern and traditional architecture is really different from that back
home. The weather has been pretty great lately too. Unfortunately, it's
just not meant to last. My first couple of days were in the 90's with
pretty close to 100% humidity. It cooled off for a few days when a storm
blew in, but now it's starting to warm back up again.
I just sent some pictures home to my family, so once
those arrive there should be a few getting put up on the blog soon. I
hope everyone is doing well! More to come next week!
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