秋田いきました。

June 15 2014

The investigator that mentioned my stomach is pretty blunt, and when my bike broke last transfer I had to carry it all the way to the church which took almost an hour, and he drove by and saw me and just laughed and drove away.

Bikes and Transfers

They used to always ship bikes to the area that you transfer to, but its really expensive and the shipping company just raised the price so its over $100 for each bike to be shipped, and that money comes from the tithing fund, so we were all asked to pray about it, and the decision they came to was that we would just leave our bikes in our area and use the old missionaries bike when we transfer there.  It was sad because I was taking really good care of my bike and now I have one that is almost 2 years old, but its for the better I suppose.

Akita is the most diverse branch in the mission, there are Tongans, Americans, and Colombians here.  Of course it is still mostly Japanese people, but all of the classes arent even in Japanese, so we have to translate either from English to Japanese or from Japanese to English for several people.  The area is also really nice to, for some reason people just seem to be a lot nicer when you are out in the country.  

The journey to Akita was a very long one.  I met my new companion in Sendai which is where you always go for transfers, since my companion is also district leader he had a district leader training meeting the next

morning at the mission HQ in Sendai so we slept in the Elders apartment there in Sendai that night. Then normally the next day we would have headed to Akita, but the following day was the Morioka Zone Meeting and from Akita it is about a 4 hour train ride, and since ZTM starts in the morning they usually just go the night before and stay at the Zone Leaders apartment in Morioka so that's what we did, then after ZTM we finally got on a train back to Akita and got to our apartment just a few minutes after 9:00 pm. I also had my bags with me so I had to drag those around the whole time which was pretty annoying but nothing you can really do about that during transfers.

Speaking of apartments, ours is super far away, its about a 20 minute bike ride from the church, but we just found out we are getting a new apartment which is right next door to the church, we just had a guy from the moving company at our apartment to figure out the costs and everything, we are moving into the new apartment on the 7th of next month I believe so we have to get everything all packed, and I just barely unpacked all of my stuff.

New Companion

My new companion Elder Earl is great. We have been getting along really well, he is a democrat from Utah, you don't meet to many of those I feel like. So sometimes we have to be careful about our discussions in the apartment because he supported Obama and everything so his political views are of course different, not that we talk about that much as missionaries, and we aren't supposed to with other people either. His Chinese is really good though, and 2 of the sister missionaries here are actually from Hong Kong, so that's been interesting. 1 of them I was in the MTC with and the other one was in my last district in Ishinomaki. The large branch is definitely one of the highlights of Akita, they are all really great and helpful, and unlike Ishinomaki, we actually get food from and fed by the members here.

And Happy Birthday to Mom and Happy Fathers Day to Dad, omedetou gozaimasu! And otanjyoubi gozaimasu!

Love you guys,

-Elder Canepari