The rainy season continues

I'm glad to hear that you are both settled in Grandpa's basement. I know moving (again) was really hard on you, but I'm really glad I wasn't there. Ugh, I love packing things in little boxes and playing life-sized tetris with them, but I don't like not having a bed/futon to sleep on, and having a zillion things to do.

Yep. No fears on the job - you have about a year to get settled somewhere before I come home. This is thinking a little bit ahead, but when I get released from my mission I won't have a lot of time before school starts. I probably start school with jet lag. Anyway, we'll worry about that when the time comes. My companion got her *death call* as they call it, last transfers. She knows exactly when she will leave, and then she had to figure stuff out, like who is going to come visit her, and for how long, etc. So we'll deal with that much later. The death call doesn't come until about 6 months before the end of your mission. So we'll cross that road then.

I was happy to get an email from Grandpa. I was actually kinda shocked. With his automatic sprinkler, and also with the DSL.

Oh, and for the record, I really don't have that much stuff. I mean, sure it took me 2 trips to get it all to Denver, but that was my little Kia, which I hope is still alive. You had two cars. I think the real question is how much stuff you have! Did it weigh 2 tons again?

We have a new family in the ward - from America. The dad has been here starting work, while the mom was packing with her 3 kids under 11. She sold or gave everything away. The rest is coming over by boat.　I wonder when it will come.... haha. So at least you didn't have to ship your stuff by boat. That could be interesting.

I have more than enough dendo money. It's like it's expensive to live in Japan. But it's not really, if you just ride your bike everywhere. My bike and I are real close. There's a joke that you always need to have three things. The spirit, your companion, and your bike. Yep. I think I'm doing okay right now.

This week we have had a couple of adventures. On Thursday morning we traveled again to Noko Island. There is a part-member family there who has a non-member friend. She is a 60 year old widow who has a giant bamboo field. So some ward missionaries, my companion and I, and the zone leaders from the next area over came to do this service.

So imagine me, in Japan, with a sickle thing, cutting down bamboo. So bamboo grows really well in Japan. Too well, so we had to cut down the little small bamboo trees that were growing so that the crop as a whole is stronger. Some of these trees are HUGE. And then we have some that went bad, and we had to tear them down and make piles. It was hot, muggy, and surprisingly fun. Bamboo is such an interesting tree. It has little chambers all the way up that hold... water? But some started decomposing so if we cracked it dirty water came out. In some it was more pasty. It was kinda brown, so we called it peanut butter. Yummy. It got all over one of the Elder's face when he cracked a fallen tree above him. It was like we were in the jungle...of bamboo trees.

The other adventure we had this week involved finding this one member's house. There was a warning on the member page in our missionary binder that said it was 40 mins by bike away. It was written in red pen. Lindsay Shimai wanted to see the full extent of our area, and we hadn't been there yet, and we had time, so we went for it.

It took us 2 hours. Seriously. There was a slight incline the whole way.
Especially at the end. This family:s house was on top of a mountain.
So we got to this one place on the map and saw stairs in real life.
Oh, so that:s what the dotted line on the map meant. We could have gotten to the top by doing a switchback on our bikes, but we joked about just taking our bikes up the stairs. Haha. Good one, right?

But then my companion started up the stairs by pushing/pulling her bike up. I told her I thought she was kidding. Nope. I'll send those pictures next. I have one with my companion pulling her bike up. I think the subtitle of those pictures will be, and I thought my companion was kidding. On the way back it only took us 1 hour. When we got home that night we wrote a *special precaution* on the member sheet. 40 minutes if you are an Elder. 2 hours if you are a Sister. I can't believe I could do that. I truly have thunder thighs.

So that's pretty much what we've been doing. Today, the sisters from Nakatsu are coming over for P-day. Tomorrow is zone conference and they need somewhere to sleep. But they're coming early so we can go bowling. I'm excited. Tomorrow's zone conference is all the missionaries on the island of Kyushu, and all the missionaries that we just got from the Hiroshima Mission.

Did I tell you that the Hiroshima MIssion, just north of us, split, and we get half and the Kobe mission gets half? So we want to welcome them. The mission president wanted to get the missionaries from Okinawa also to come up for the conference, but it wasn't approved by the area presidency. Oh well. But that means that tomorrow I will get to see my MTC Companion. I'm so excited! I wonder who is going to feed this army of Helaman?

Random thing about Japan #52; the vegetables here are absolutely perfect. In America, when you buy strawberries, you buy it knowing you are going to throw a few of them away, but use the rest. Here, the fruit and veggies are the most perfect things you have ever seen in your life. I don't know if I've ever seen a perfect giant eggplant before in my life. Did you know eggplant really has a lot of flavor? You should try it in your cooking. I'm serious. Just fry it with your other veggies. It's magic.

Okay, until next week, cya 頑張って！

檸檬　姉妹
Remon Shimai

Isn't *lemon* in Japanese a crazy Kanji? It:s something like 20 strokes for each character. Most Nihonjin just say　レモン.

P.S. Let me know if you can see that Kanji. I think it's pretty cool.