Yokohama Thunder Thighs!

Wow! Sounds like a crazy trip! But I bet Audrey will never forget it! Haha. Weird to think that next year I will be there as well!

Ah man it's so weird to me that one of my companions has already met my parents! Haha. I love Elder Belnap! Ya I feel like my English is fine but at the same time I really have nothing to compare it to so I could be horrible. I know I'm losing my English grammar when I speak pretty hard. There's this one specific grammar principal in English I just can't get right. In Japanese it's so easy.

So ya I LOVE my new area! People say that if you get called to Yokohama you get the Yokohama thunder-thighs. It's very true. We basically bike everywhere and there are massive hills everywhere! Our apartment(there is 4 missionaries in this one too) is at the top of a pretty ridiculously steep hill. I'm making it a goal to ride up it every time so I can get stronger. I am zone leader with Elder Yoshikawa over Yokohama South zone. I honestly don't know yet how many people are in our zone haha but there are three separate districts with about ten missionaries in each. It's pretty different from district leader in that I don't plan for the district meeting every week. We do do the zone meeting every month though.

Yoshikawa Choro is my companion and he is so great! He is from Osaka. He is 3 transfers ahead of me right now. He's just so funny and obedient and is great.

So ya this week I left Kohoku and took a 40ish minute train strait to gumyoji station. On the train I talked to three business men (they were together) and they were headed home to Kyoto from a business trip in Tokyo. They speak a dialect of Japanese called kansaiben in Kyoto and well the kansai area. So they were speaking mad kansai and I wasn't getting any of it haha. Two guys spoke to me in kanto (like tokyo and Yokohama area) Japanese so I could understand. But whenever one of the guys would talk to me I just stared at him like I did when I first got to Japan whenever I talked to anybody haha. They thought I was insane for not drink sake. In that ten minutes the topics of word of wisdom, law of chastity and other things came out haha. I missed my stop talking to them. I bailed on the whole thing once the guys started to get really creepy.

This week We were throwing down a kubarikai (where we pass out chirashi) and these two different old ladies stopped and were so happy that we did free English class! The one lady was soooo happy that I could read Japanese. She literally stepped back and clapped her hands haha it was the best. So I hope they come!

It's getting way cold here! Like I guess you said it should be in the 50s, which I don't know what feels like anymore since I use Celsius haha, but it feels so much colder than that! I bought a really nice p coat at a thrift store in back in kichijoji and its way warm! I'm glad I come home in the summer though because that means I can get rid of/send some stuff home that I only use in the winter before I come home. There's noooo way I could bring all this stuff home.

So we were flying down a hill and I felt that should stop and check my front tire so I called out to Elder Yoshikawa and we stopped. The tire was a bit loose and the brake brake pads were running against the wheel how it was supposed to. So we fixed the looseness but couldn't fix the tire. So we walk a little bit and an old guy calls out to us and we stop and talked to him. He has no interest but he wanted to gives us a ton of little toys he made out of like plastic bottles and milk packs and stuff. It was weird but nice to have someone want to share something they thought was good too! We went just a little bit further and stopped another guy and he didn't really have interest either but turns out that he works at a bike shop! So he fixed my bike for me right there! It was awesome!

I know that we can improve through Christ's atonement. The atonement of Christ isn't only for sinners to repent, it's also for saints to become stronger and better. I know that he has again restored his church and all the ordinances and covenants that we need to return to God again and to live with him forever.


I love you!

Elder Draper


PS I can't wait to talk to you on my Saturday!

ドレーパー長老