Saijo

I transferred! I’m currently in Saijo. Where is that? Well, I didn’t know either. Look at your lovely map of Japan. Okay, now go to the big island, and zoom in to Hiroshima. Now go to the east of Hiroshima and follow the normal train line or the Bullet train line until you see Saijo. It’s pretty much just a college town. This is the city the Hiroshima College is in. It’s HUGE. Besides the college there it's not much. Here is the real kicker. We don’t have a church. We don’t even have a branch. We had to go for about an hour train ride over to Hiroshima’s Hikari Ward to go to church. They stuck missionaries out here about 2 years ago, hoping to strengthen this area to start a branch. Well, there have been some great success here, we think, but not yet on the whole branch thing.

This area was an Elder area. My new companion, Sister Cruz, and I opened it as sisters. That means that once again I get to inherit an Elder’s apartment. I don’t know what happened in Miyazaki that I missed the fact that I have to go through all of this again. I cleaned the 2nd disgusting shower of my mission. We have been literally cleaning straight since Thursday. Thursday we bought new futons. Friday we cleaned out the closets in the sleeping/study room.   Saturday we moved on to the kitchen. Everything is just so gross!

This is how I imagine Jay’s apartment to be if there were two of him there straight for 2 years. I am so tired of cleaning. Seriously!

The greasy film over the wall above the stove took 2 hours of straight scrubbing, one tile at a time. There were mosquitoes breeding in the shower. Half of the food in the apartment was expired. I wanted to give up when I saw just the amount of stuff left over by old missionaries. We already threw out 7 bags of trash, and have 3+ more waiting for the next garbage day. And those bags don’t include our recyclables, glass/cans, and non-burnable, which are all in different trash bags in Japan. I don’t know how Elders live like this.

Seriously!

My companion is pretty cool. She is from Sacramento California. She is a missionary refugee from the Tokyo Mission. She was in Nagasaki for 4 weeks before coming here. She wasn’t too excited about transferring after only 4 weeks, then inheriting a dirty apartment, but now that our apartment isn’t too gross, she seems to be doing better. She said she was a little scarred from the earthquake. She feels like she feels little earthquakes all the time, and it freaks her out.

Thanks for the Easter package. I got it and ate it all right before transfers. Those little baby Snickers are the best to just pop in your mouth for a moment of happiness.

Since we are both new to this area, we are having fun just going around. But when we arrived on Thursday there was no one at the Eki to show us where our apartment was as the Elders said there would be.

Well, we had an address, and there was a map at the Eki, so we decided to walk it. We have the GPS in the phone, so maybe that would work? We stopped at the Post Office for my companion to get money and to check the phone. Ha ha. We were two pathetic gaijins together in Japan! So anyway, this lady stopped at us and freaked out. She saw our name tags, and said something in Japanese that I would translate into "what in the world?!"   It turns out that she is the Relief Society President, and felt like she needed to go to the post office right then. Miracle! She showed us to our apartment, and announced to everyone that we were here. Yep. Then the members in the area took us out to eat on Friday, and Saturday. I think God knew my companion wouldn't eat in our kitchen. Ha ha.

Let's see... what else happened this week? Not really much. See the pictures, they're pretty good.

Happy Easter



レモン姉妹



The apartment in middle of cleaning!

All this food, and more, was expired.  we threw it out.  No food poisoning for me.

The bathtub.  No joke.  I wanted to barf!



My new Companion Sister Cruz holding the Elder's name tag she found.