So the area I am in is called Saijo. It is technically in the Hiroshima area but just slightly east. There are only a couple members that live in the area, so we don't have a branch or church building or anything in our area. We all meet in the Hikari ward which is about a 40 min. train ride. It's a pretty large area as well. We have 3 sorta small towns that are in our area. Needless to say it is lots of biking around. I have probably already biked around 4 or 5 hours between Saturday and Sunday because we don't have a church building we can do our lessons in. Usually we have to do a 20 min. bike ride to the college to do lessons there. I am glad that we have a college in our area though, I like working with younger kids. It is real cool. Our apartment we live in is just a kitchen, a study room, and then the room we sleep in plus a bathroom. It's not bad and yes we do all of our own cooking although I did get a member lunch already which was real cool. For my first meal my companion (Elder Dolbin) cooked me some squid. It was actually pretty good, I don't know why I never had some before. Oh yeah so my companion is Elder Dolbin. He is from Sandy, Utah, so the native speaker and having to pick up the Japanese real fast like I hoped didn't quite come to pass.
We have actually been speaking much more English than I was expecting. since we have a college here, we have many more foreigners and their English is good enough that we teach them in that. We have already had 3 lessons in English. They were all way cool too. One of the girls that we teach in English remembered missionaries from when she was little and apparently her family used to hang out with them and she has a CTR (Choose the Right) ring that she has worn for like the last idk how many years but a pretty long time from what I understood. She remembered how fun missionaries were and approached the elders in the area before us and now we are teaching her. When we told her that we know what our life's purpose was and that we know what happens after we die her eyes just got super big and was like you know what happens!?! and got way excited. We are teaching her that in about 2 hours. The other two English lessons we taught were to a Chinese guy named Gary (not his real name), and a Muslim guy from Turkey that said he would read the Book of Mormon, and wanted to learn more, but refused to meet again and said that it was not allowed. So that was that. Other than that though, that was pretty much my week.
My trainer is only 4 transfers in and already District Leader so we are both still learning lots but he is much much farther along than me. I don't know what the heck these people are saying unless its simple stuff like "I don't have time" or "no, I've never thought about that".
Well I'm not sure what else has happened this week. I'm not sure if I've stopped sweating since I got here. I also found out we are required to wear our suits every day from October to March soooo those are prolly gonna get pretty dirty which is unfortunate.
Saijo is a pretty awesome place though and I'm real excited to be here. A few months ago they had 0 investigators and were just contacting, so it is growing. We do lots of contacting every day and lessons sometimes too. They are really trying to get a new church building in Saijo that we can use but every time the word church is brought up by the realtor they back out and don't wanna sell it to us for some reason. Oh also guess what Stevo? The sweet Japanese people still have a crush on Tom Cruise (When our family lived in Japan and when Steve served his mission there, the women always told him he looked just like Tom Cruise). My companion has gotten it 3 times already since I've been with him. They think he looks like Tom Cruise --- haha pretty funny.
The Japanese people are awesome though, either they won't even stop to talk to us or they will stop on the street and let us teach a whole like 6 min. lesson and then will say "sorry I'm not interested" if we try to meet again. Sometimes when we say Jesus Christ they just laugh at us. Silly little people. Well that's all I can think of for now. Saijo is awesome though and has the work cut out for us. Real awesome!!!! I hope you are all doing well.
Lots of love from Japan!!
Elder Bloomfield
Trying out the food
Turning Monkey
Thought for the week:
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