Week Eight

Nothing much has happened much this week, except for getting our travel plans yesterday! We were hoping to get them on Thursday, but apparently Pioneer Day (which we didn't celebrate here) kept the mail from coming on time. However, it's just great to see that we will be leaving pretty soon! Our itinerary is kind of weird, we leave the MTC at 2:30 am, catch an American Airlines plane to Dallas, after about an hour fly American Airlines again to Tokyo, and then fly to Sendai on ANA after about five hours in Narita. It's going to be pretty crazy. The rest of our district, the one's going to Tokyo, are flying through LAX, but they don't even leave the MTC until around 11 am, so we'll actually arrive in our mission before them! I made a chart of our flight plans converted into Utah and Japan time, so I'll send that sometime later. After getting our plans, it's been so much harder to focus on anything, because all any of us can think of is actually going to Japan. 
We also had a leaving devotional for Japanese missionaries, and it was amazing. We heard about how Heber J. Grant had declared that Japan would be one of the countries where missionary work becomes most successful. After hearing that, and how they believe that Japan is now ready to really receive the gospel, we all knew we had been called to the best mission. It'll be kind of sad to say good bye to all the missionaries going to other parts of Japan, but it's still really amazing to finally start doing the work in Japan. 
I hadn't actually heard from Andrew yet, but based on what he said to Aunt Cheryl, it seems that he's been super busy. It's crazy what his experience has been like, good thing it's easy to enter Japan. Not much else to say, I'll probably be spending the next week packing and finding things to ship back home. Tell Eliza I sent her a real letter. If you have any questions, I'll be on for a bit, and I'll come back on around three as well (can't stay on too long due to laundry). 待ったね！

We arrive in Sendai at about 8 pm their time, so at least we'll be able to sleep once we make it to Japan. The Tokyo group doesn't get to Tokyo until 11 pm! We've been looking at Sendai and can tell that it's the most amazing city. The MTC is fine, but it gets really boring after a while. Sometimes it feels like time doesn't really exist here. I think we've started going a bit crazy, the funnest thing we've done recently is feed a sparrow out of our hands (the birds here are really friendly).

Yeah, we've heard that we are going to have two days at the mission home, and then right to our area, which could be way far from Sendai. I actually have to go now, but we'll be back at 3:00 or so. Be ready!

I miss decent food. The food here is normally fine, but it's extremely repetitive, so I'm getting very bored of it. Our district is probably the most loved in the MTC, I've never seen another group get more packages and letters. I'm pretty sure Snow Shimai alone gets more than most other districts.