Greetings from a ridiculously cold and cloudy Tokyo! Lately we have been having more and more Spring days so this week's sudden turn for the worst is MOST unwelcome. The cherry tree blossoms should be appearing soon, and there are already a few early bloomers. I am VERY excited!
Yesterday my companion and I decided to bike from our apartment in Matsudo to the church in Abiko. We are over both areas, but the train is not the cheapest so we wanted to see how feasible it was to go by bike. Our appointments for the day were few (one) and late (dinner appointment! Whoo!) so we decided to head out after morning study, arrive at the church, estimate how long it took and house with our spare time, then return with enough time to look good and nice for the appointment (i.e. smooth our hair in the mirror and remove bugs from our teeth).
Well, we got a REALLY neat referral that required some coordination (I'll talk about that next week, after we've met with her, but basically she's a pro-manga artist. I am excited.) so we set out later than we originally planned but still with plenty of time. We decided to use more back roads rather than the main road because we could have better conversations if we didn't have to yell over the noise of busy traffic. It was all going well until I asked my companion to lead but gave her bad directions. She set off with a blast and went straight...when she really, REALLY needed to turn right. Augh, I thought, I've just killed my companion. Well, no, but going straight did mean that we went DOWN a mountain when we were supposed to go along the top. And we had just spent the better part of an hour climbing aforementioned mountain. (A note to Utah readers: mountain = large hill, no higher than the Y, but that's still high!)
After racing to catch up with my zooming companion and explaining what I had done, we discovered a new route that was actually faster but required much more map chacking due to the labyrinth of roads commonly found in Tokyo. By the time we made it to Abiko church we were cold, tired, and had made 3 bad turns making the total trip 3 hours.
Our appointment was in 90 minutes and was about 10 minutes from our apartment.
We decided to go for it and raced home on the main busy road. It was exactly 90 minutes later when we rang her doorbell, panting but smiling and VERY pleased with ourselves.
We slept very well that night.
All in all it was a great day. We went far, we talked to a lot of people along the way, and we learned a lot about the roads.
Tomorrow we are conducting a training for the Zone Conference. It will be my first time conducting training. I am excited but rather nervous, as the topic is "How to speak Japanese fluently." You may scoff and say, "You'll be fine, you already spoke Japanese." Ah, I shall respond, but my audience are all older than I am in terms of mission-age, and many of them speak MUCH better Japanese than I do.
I am still looking forward to it.
I have written a number of letters over the past two weeks, but if you feel you haven't gotten a letter from me lately and you desire to bask more fully in the love I feel for you all, drop me a line (either e-mail or a letter) and be sure to include your correct mailing address. Family, you can do this too.
See you next week!
