Strange Holiday's and Crazy Cars!

Hello there my beloved mother! 今日は私の愛する母！

Well this week has been quick and long both at the same time! In just a couple more days I will have entered into my 8th month!

My mission is changing my life. I have learned so much in these past 7 months and I just think I still have 17 months left! I think the biggest thing that I have learned up until now is the necessity and the power in trusting in the Lord and our Heavenly Father. I know that if we do as we know is right then the Lord will bless us to be able to do His will, and his will is always what is right! 

So just to answer the questions about Easter and other holidays. So imagine all the holidays they have in American. Ok did you do that? Now get rid of them. Welcome to Japan!  That's not entirely true, they do kind of have Christmas but they just eat cake and KFC. Easter just straight up doesn't exist here. They have Mother's Day and Valentine's Day but along with Valentine's Day they also have white day. Valentine's Day is where the girls give stuff to the guys; white day is when the guys give stuff to the girls. But with all of the holidays they don't have, they also have like a billion random holidays. They have kids day, like old people day, girls day, boys day. Etc.  They also have to take a test to get into junior high school and high school. If they don't pass then they don't go to high school or Jr high. It's also not illegal to have movies playing on the front screen of the car, they have those neon lights on like so many cars, which is also illegal in America. Even the minivans have them! Actually most minivans have the neon lights on the rims and underneath the car. Just while I'm on the topic of cars, there is a motorcycle street race every night right in front of my apartment. On Friday I saw one Lamborghini and 2 Ferraris! 

But yes I did get the package! Thank you so much! So there is this thing called Tim Tams. It is I a delicious chocolate bar that comes in a big pack and they are Australian but they are everywhere here. So if you take hot chocolate and the Tim tam and bit off both ends and use it as a straw, it is delicious! It's called a tim tam slam. But I found out that you can do it with thin mints too! You should try it. Anyways I love the candy and everything that was in it! Just a heads up... In my next package whenever that is, can you send me q tips and more Cadbury eggs? Thanks! But I loved the stuff you all put in there! 

So last week on Monday, we did emails in the morning and then we were all going to a place called Round 1 Stadium where we could play bubble soccer. So we biked over there for about half an hour and then got a call telling us that was a Holliday, don't ask me which holiday because I don't know haha, but it was really busy and we would have had to wait an hour and a half. So we just rode back to the church and the Yokoto Elders met us there and we played piano, takyuu (ping pong), basketball outside, and made a birthday video for Elder Molen's mom! After that we had a 配り会 (Kubarikai where we pass out Eikaiwa chirashi) for a while. We passed out probably a hundred or so. I decided to take my language to a higher standard. I have found that almost no one; at least that I have met so far, likes to speak Japanese with other Americans. They seem to only speak it when speaking to natives. But PMG and the white handbook clearly say that we should speak our assigned mission languages as much as possible. So I decided to commit myself to it. It is hard and there are still times when I find myself speaking English, but I am really trying to change that. I have also been trying to think everything in Japanese. English just feels so natural when thinking, so I would say thinking in Japanese is even harder than speaking Japanese. 

On Tuesday we did a blitz (where all the missionaries in the district go to one area and just dendo it up for a couple hours and try to do our best to spread the gospel in one concentrated area) in Higashimurayama.  It was good, we did a Kubarikai for like 2 hours and passed out hundreds of chirashi! Then it turned out that the area we were doing it in said that it was illegal to Kubarikai there. We didn't know it until after that fact though. Also this morning I didn't know what to study in language study so me and Elder Molen decided to learn all about space. I can tell you almost everything I know how to say in Japanese about space and aliens as I can in English. The ocean too. That was fun. Elder Holland said to stretch yourself in the language you are learning. He told missionaries "Don't be satisfied with what we call a missionary vocabulary only. Stretch yourself to in the language, and you will gain greater access to the hearts of the people" so I have been doing my regular study of words I hear through out the day, grammar, kanji, and now random topics every couple days. It's way fun! 

On Wednesday I made Chahan (or fried rice) and it was way good! Except for the fact that I am a chaotic cook! It was good don't get me wrong, but there was rice and meat and egg and stuff everywhere! In Japan it's totally ok to eat raw eggs. We do it all the time. You can cook meat and then dip it in raw egg and it is way good! But also just a nice bowl of hot white rice with a raw egg on it is good. So we put a raw egg on our Chahan because I forgot to cook it. Then we went and ate ramen for dinner with Kyou San, the other elder's investigator getting baptized on the 2nd of April. Just as a side note, it is very rude to not finish every single grain of rice. Another side note, my chopstick skills are incredible now. I will most likely just use chopsticks for ever meal when I get home. 

On Thursday we went to Hibarigaoka for splits with the Zone leaders. At first me and Elder Rose went to teach a man they have been teaching. We first cleaned his apartment with him for about 30 minutes (he's a bit of a hoarder) and then we talked about the Book of Mormon for the next 30 minutes and invited him to be baptized!  Then I split with elder Matsumoto who's is actually from the north mission area. He is about an hour away from home right now it's so crazy! But we visited some potential investigators he had found while housing. None were home. We spoke Japanese the whole time and it was way fun! Hard work and prayer makes all the difference. The gift of tongues is so reall! The Holy Ghost and God's power is so real! Never underestimate it.

On Friday we had district meeting. We taught Yamamoto San about the atonement. We don't know how to help him. He loves the Book of Mormon but he just doesn't see the spiritual necessity of it. So if you could pray that he can do that, that would be great! 

On Saturday we met with Azuma in the morning and he just thinks us meeting with him is English class. We told him that we weren't English teachers, we were missionaries. And even though we do teach English as a service, that isn't our purpose. He didn't pay attention though. We also went to a small Sakura festival. They had some live music. There were 3 girls. A piano, a box drum and a big xylophone thing. I thought to myself "I bet you Audrey could play all 3 at the same time." Because I'm pretty sure it's true haha. Then that night there was a wedding reception going on at the church and we were there just reporting some stuff. Then a lady asked us why we weren't in there. We said that we weren't invite da Kara. She then made us go in and then she proceeded to fill 2 huge bowls of food for us even thought we just barely had dinner. It was really hard to eat it all. But the wedding was so unorganized!  Elder Kaesler leaned over to me and said "Elder, please if you do anything, make sure your wedding is more organized than this." Haha it was funny. 

Today is Sunday. We went to church at 8 am and did personal study there. Then we had English conversation class from 9 until 10:45. We talked about the differences between fake, phony, false, forgery, and counterfeit. Then right at the last minute, literally at 10:44 a guy, who usually only shows up to activities with food, came in and sat down. We said "welcome! We literally just ran out of time but do you have any questions?" He seriously just looked at the board and picked the first word he saw and asked "What does forgery mean?"  we were like you just barely came in and you already have a questions about forgery? haha he's an interesting guy. Then we had church and President Stevens, The second counselor to president Wada, he spoke and it was great! It's so amazing that I actually understand sacrament meeting. It is such a blessing! After church, Elder Kaesler did the baptism interview for Kyou San. The whole time I just learned Japanese kid games from a kid named Arai Haruki. We also arm wrestled a lot. He is 10. He kept wanting to punch my abs too. He was crazy but it was really fun just to get to know him and all of the like 5 versions, each a different difficulty, of Rock Paper Scissors.  Of course they call it Janken Po here but ya. Then we went home teaching with a member. The road system here barely exists. The roads are crazy and small! Elder Kaesler gets car sick way easy so after the chaotic lesson with a young family with 5 kids, we drove home and he was really sick so we just came to the apartment and let him rest. So that was my week! It was a good one! 

How is the weather in Idaho? It's funny because whenever I tell people that I am from Idaho they always say "OOH big potato!" Haha for some reason they ALL know that Idaho has potatoes! In an English class I told them all the ways you can eat a potato, hash brown, fries, raw, mashed, salad, baked, etc. haha and it totally surprised them that there were so many ways to eat them

This Monday morning we went and dropped off my dry cleaning, that I needed to do in the MTC but haven't since then, and I had NO clue what the lady was saying. But we got it done! It should be done on shigatsunotsuitachi. The first of April. Fun fact, in Japanese they don't use spaces. So the words are actually shigatsu no tsuitachi. We did all the shopping already this morning and now we just got to the church! ALso the Sakura have been blooming but very slowly so I don't really have any pictures of them yet. But I will by next p day for sure! 

I love you so much!

ドレーパー長老

(I asked where the other missionaries in his apartment are from) Elder Molen is from alpine Utah and Elder Uemura is from Kansai Japan. Funny thing, the dialect they speak in Kansai is literally banned by president Wada. Isn’t that weird? But in Japan there are so many dialects but they all can stop speaking it pretty easy I guess. Especially us gaijin really aren't supposed to use Kansai. For the phrase  "I don't know" it is "Wakaranai" But in kansaiben they say "Wakarahen" so just weird things like that haha. In Tokyo is  "pure" Japanese. So I like that I am learning the pure Japanese!