Another Week of Groundhog Day

Hello peeps!!!!

First a little maintenance answering questions. Um we come early to do laundry and 5:30 so we have more time to write letters and such the rest of the day. Kind of annoying to wake up this early but it pays off after. Yay for Kreigh's school!!!!! I'm excited for him. I know he can do great! Yay for little Atreyu and being a moving little guy now! He seems to have grown up so much since I left just over a month ago! Crazy! Sounds like you guys had fun in Wyoming looking at windmills and such. Kind of shocked you two went rafting but I guess as you two get older you might get a little crazier! :-)

Anyway now for MTC stuff. Again organize in random order.

First investigators. So we still haven't taught Kudosan again because she is still on her trip to "Tokyo" but we get her back next week so that will be nice. We got Morimoto san through all the required lessons and he is doing so good.....except he won't give up his tea and "sake" (alcohol). Goodness. I knew that was going to happen so kind of why I didn't want to teach the Word of Wisdom first but whatever. His baptism has been scheduled for next wednesday but he is never going to make that. :-( Nevertheless we will get him there. We also had a bunch of subs this week so we also teach them sometimes. Depending on who they are they can be really nice or really annoying (and real). Nevertheless those didn't go so well. None of the teaching goes horribly well, I still just have a problem thinking of what to say let alone in Japanese. Can't even teach these lessons in English. I hope that ability comes fairly quickly cause this is getting annoying. Nevertheless. We teach a lot. Oh and we picked up two new investigators being two missionaries in my district who act as investigators and also I get to act like a progressing investigator now. Its quite an interesting experience. Although language barriers become "less" of an issue because we all know the same words and such (kinda).

Moving on to the random stuff. Sundays are good. There is just a lot of studying which normally turns into us watching movies on LDS.org. Its great fun, I swear we will have seen every movie on there by the end. We have already seen every Mormon profile. There is also priesthood and sacrament meeting where we have a musical number like every time which is cool. As for companion things are still going pretty good. We have our moments that he pushes my buttons or always needs to be in control but nevertheless we survive. District is also going pretty good. We are going to be getting a new room in two weeks which is sweet!!! Our one now is not next to any Japanese speakers on Spanish, we have no window only a one-way mirror, and its just small. New one is the bomb though! Ok so apparently I didn't make this clear before and Elder Clayton wanted me to make sure you knew. We have STACKS of food in our room now. Ha. I got three packages yesterday which I appreciate but I really doubt I could eat all this food in the next few weeks. We can't really munch on it throughout the day we have 30 minutes each night to get ready for bed, write in journals, prepare for the next day, eat snacks, and get to bed. So no more food. :-) Ok now for a shirt I was told about that I think would be legit. Apparently in Japan you can get these English shirts that say, "Send ai" as in "Sendai" but the funny thing is "ai" means "love". Therefore "send love" :-) I thought it was funny (jokes in here are weird).

The senpai are now gone off in Japan. Just a crazy thought to think. The day after they left we sat down at our "Japanese table" for lunch and I felt compelled to sing a little "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables" in honor of them. They were super excited though. It was like a graduation the last Sunday. Lots of pictures and hugs and all that jazz. We get our kohai next Wednesday which is scary! I'm not old enough to be a senpai! (Age is measured weird here too). Adding to the stress there are 43 coming in!!!!!! Holy cow! There will only be 24 of us senpai. There will also be 8 new sisters to add to our 2 now. Finally in a few weeks when we get our nihonjin (Japanese missionaries) there will be 20 more of them too! So many!!!!! Ha. I'm excited though. So we have started to come up with analogies we could make about how the MTC works. Our first was that they are programming us to be Gospel Spouting Robots. This is a pretty good analogy and one of our sensei agreed with us. But our new one is that it is real life "Groundhog Day" Every day is exactly the same!!! Ha. It gets kinda annoying. Never the less its cool. Enjoyable most the time.

Random things I learned this week. Apparently every companionship in the Tokyo mission received a laptop to do all their business on with teaching records that ties into the ward and stake and all that jazz. Pretty awesome! This church is getting the picture of the future. Also random note for our "workshop" (more on these later letter) we got to go around the MTC and watch movies on iPod Touchs. Kinda interesting. One thing that is kinda sad that I was looking forward to from your (dad) stories was learning about culture. They don't do that anymore. Whenever we ask they just say, "We are going to teach that, just rely on your gaijin power" (Gaijin being "foreigner"). Apparently you get away with a lot as a foreigner. Although yesterday we did have sub that loved talking culture so that was fun. She told us fun ways to proselyte and what works and what doesn't. Apparently if you ask for people's names in Japanese they brush you off but if you ask in English they get all excited to speak English and want to talk to you. Fun stuff.

Answers to Questions:
Competitive 4-square is hard to explain. Its really fast. The squares are like 5 times as big as elementary school squares. People do tricks, there are alliances, backbiting, all that fun stuff.

The devotional speakers have been good. Not sure if I have had a favorite. Our last one was about Heavenly Father which was basically the best talk about Heavenly Father I had ever heard cleared some cool stuff up. We hear lots of cool mission stories. Really simple concepts like "Faith" are blown up so you can better explain it to investigators. We finally got up to a member of the first quorum of the 70 so we are moving up. Mostly we get missionary department people.

5 weeks into this experience it kinda still feels like the first week. There are many times I don't feel like I am getting anywhere and others I think I'm doing pretty good. Something that I think sums up the language at times is what Elder Clayton told me one day. We were just sitting there studying and he turns to me ans says, "Does it every just hit you that we just taught someone the gospel in another language?" Pretty awesome to be able to share the gospel first of all and second to do it in tongues. The food is a little getting old but its actually quite good but there is so much of it. Also Clayton choro doesn't allow me not to eat all my food because he says it is ruining mother earth. We have got into a few discussions about that but nevertheless.

Anyway. As always love you lots and lots, talk to you next week!