Once again, I have come to tell you about my week and I am without a camera cord. Which is a shame because I have some gorgeous pictures this time. I will simply have to have a very picture oriented post in future. Sorry, Shana. I also have a flash drive full, so I need to send it home. This scares me, as I am worried it will break. I will break down and ship it eventually---I really need space.
I had a wonderful birthday, thank you everyone who wished me a happy birthday! It was awesome. I woke up to find that my roommates had heart attacked my desk. They also hid little presents all over the apartment. I have a pencil that writes in 5 colors at once, a bubble-blower that blows bubbles that don't pop (really!), and I learned a few new magic tricks. I love magic tricks, so if anyone has any other ones, I would love to hear it! I know how to do the Royal Flush, the 3 piles of 3/ 3 piles of 7, Aces on top, Travelling Aces (also known as the invisible ace), and guess the card on top. I love it when people send me their ideas and tricks, especially with instructions, so thank you!! I used to be able to do This That and the Other but I can't remember some of the bits of it now...I am working on it, though.
Thanksgiving was so cool. Some people found out about the mission comic I have been doing and asked me to do a comic for the mormon.jp website [Editor's note: Remember that you can use Google Translate to translate web pages.] No one has officially requested it, but it was a thought. I think it's a cute idea, we'll see what happens.
I love hearing from all of you, and I wish I had a lot to say in return! We are still teaching and still meeting with members. We had one sweet woman come into our ward accidentally thinking it was a Catholic church. She's interested in being "healed" and wanted to hear more about our church, so she became an investigator. I don't want to give too many more details, but it was pretty cool.
Oh, yeah, so. I don't normally talk about lessons I gave or people we've met in any sort of detail. If you would like me to do so I can, but I figure this is a public blog so I could happily talk about the more mundane and random but it might be a little bimyo to talk about people I'm teaching or very spiritual experiences I have had. I recorded those in my journal, so they aren't lost, I just haven't opened them up here. Thoughts?
OH. So, some of you asked about Christmas. Uhm. This is awkward, but I am just going to tell you what I would like for Christmas here, okay?
Letters.
I LOVE getting paper letters from you all. I love coming home to a thick envelope with lots of information and occasionally photos. BEST GIFT EVER.
Just print out your blog and send it, that is so great. Send me some favorite poems and tell me why you like them, an update about the mundane, tell me about your NaNoWriMo, whatever. I just love hearing from you!
Okay, I am done.
Today I am super exhausted. Why? Because the Sisters heard about the fish market down in Tsukiji. They auction off tuna at 5 in the morning. Visitors are allowed to watch. "Let's do it!" they cried. So we woke up at 3 and left at 4 this morning so that we could get to Tsukiji.
There are no trains at 3AM, so we rode our bikes for nearly an hour in order to get there in time. Huzzah! The fish market. The fish were huge! I had no idea that tuna could get that big. They were probably around 4 feet long and supremely fat. It was so crazy.
It was actually sorta creepy. Those of you who do not eat meat or want to hear about fish selling please skip this paragraph to the next one. They had cut out huge holes where the gills usually are, so you could see the spine of the fish. All the fish were frozen and had numbers on them. The tails were hacked off and the belly, tail area, and neck area were wedged open so that people could inspect the meat. They then were sold. I didn't really enjoy looking at the fish. I can eat beef and chicken because it doesn't look a thing like a cow or a bird, so I can happily chomp away without thinking too hard about the animal itself. Fish actually look like fish when they are eaten and sold, and it was really sad to see rows upon rows of dead creatures waiting to be hacked into with ice picks and crow bars so that people could buy them wholesale.
I felt kinda ill after a while so I asked one of the other sisters to leave with me. I cannot eat fish today. I want to be a vegetarian, and if I didn't love beef so much I would be one right now. I seriously don't think I can eat fish without feeling super sick after today.
Oh, speaking of which, my Japanese Food Fast is over! I was able to eat Japanese food at a Japanese member's house on Sunday. Woohoo! I normally love Japanese food, especially ordered in restaurants in America. We were told we were having "curry pot." Sweet, curry!
We get there and there is a big post of boiling food in the middle of the table. You use chopsticks to grab food and put it into your bowl and eat it.
You'll never guess what I ate on Sunday.
Seriously, I have never eaten this 'authentically' before.
I have now eaten the following, right outta that pot:
-Cabbage
-Carrots
-Potato
-Chicken
-Onion
-Mushrooms
-Tofu
-Mochi
-Noodles
-Seaweed
-Shredded fish scales
-Fish Meatballs (<--WHY DO THESE EXIST)
-Squid
-Shrimp heads
-Octopus tentacles
I can now say with confidence that I have eaten Japanese food.
