Saying Good-by and Hello

June 22 2014

More Diversity

It seems that with Japan the larger cities tend to have more Americans, I have seen several while I have been here. Although the Tongans that live here play rugby for Japans rugby team, it kind of seems like cheating but I guess America is pretty diverse also. 

New Mission President

President and Mrs Rassmasan and Mrs Smith with President Smith

The last time we got to see President and Sister Rasmussen was at a special goodbye devotional they did here in Morioka yesterday. It was a crazy week, we actually were only in Akita for one day this last week. We had splits with the zone leaders and there was a special conference (kind of like Stake Conference) for all of Morioka. President Rasmussen only did his goodbye devotional here in Morioka so I guess we were pretty lucky to be here for that.

Cool Broadcast

We had a really cool broadcast from church headquarters in Salt Lake. It was a lot like General Conference except it was only for Japan. Elder Christopherson talked as well as the Presiding Bishop and Elder Walker. Elder Walker and the Bishop both served in Japan and they actually spoke in Japanese which was really cool to here, of course Elder Crishopherson doesn't speak Japanese so they translated it to English, but all of us English speakers were in a different room so we just heard them talk in their native language.

New Apartment

President Smith and his wife get here in 2 weeks, they will be doing a devotional here in Morioka and then they are touring every single missionary apartment in the mission, luckily we will be in a new one so it should be all clean and everything before he sees it, you wouldn't believe how messy some of these missionary apartments get. I don't know when we will be doing interviews with him, but I imagine it would probably be when he comes to Akita. 

I Hope To Ride The Bullet Train

I haven't gotten a chance to ride the bullet train, we really want to though, most missionaries have but they recently told missionaries not to ride them anymore, they are really nice and go very fast but they are also really expensive, a regular train ticket from Akita to Morioka is about 4500 Yen both ways which is about $45, the bullet trains are about 8500 Yen, so its almost twice as expensive, and the church will only reimburse us for the cheapest way of travel, although me and my companion were thinking if we ever have a little extra money left over one month we might try it and just pay the difference. Its way faster, the normal train takes about 4 hours and of course missionaries are the only ones that take it to go such a far distance. I think the bullet train is more like an hour and a half which is pretty nice. The used to let missionaries take it but recently told us not to because of the cost, that's why it took us so long to get to Akita from Ishinomaki, that was more like 6 hours, the bullet train would have been nice.

Sushi

Unlike America sushi is actually really cheap in this country, so usually we just go to restaurants if we are going to eat it, there are some really great sushi places here, we actually go to them pretty regularly, for $10 you can get about 20 pieces of sushi here, which is usually more than I can eat.

Church

We come to the church almost everyday for various meetings and for the English and Chinese class, the branch here also does both institute and seminary, so there is something going on here everyday. We teach some lessons here, but I actually haven't really gotten to meet any of the investigators yet, although we are teaching the Word of Wisdom to one of them today. And one of our investigators is a kid from Brazil and we are going to be playing Basketball with him later tonight so that should be good.

Well, that's about it for this week, it was mostly spent in Morioka because we had splits with the zone leaders and the conference and devotional. This week is actually all going to be spent in Akita for once.

Love you guys,

-Elder Canepari