Week Seven

おはいようございます！This week has been pretty interesting, now that everyone seems to be going. It was pretty sad to see Andrew and Carlin leave. On the last day, Carlin told me he had a few Chinese grammer books to give me, and so I went to the Chinese residency to pick them up. It was a bit crazy, though, because the Chinese take forever to leave their classrooms, so we ended up leaving their apartment around 10:15, which is when we're supposed to be in our rooms. We still made it back before it was too late, at least. I think they were ready to leave, though. 
After a while, this place can get pretty boring, with the same schedule week after week. Sometimes, it feels like nothing is really happening here. Wednesday was pretty crazy, though. New Japanese missionaries finally came in, this time heading to the northern missions that we're going to. As usual, I was hosting, and I finally got to host someone going to Japan, which was cool even though he wasn't going to Sendai. My other people were going to Tempe, Boise (Spanish speaking, native speaker), and Sydney. The amount of people going to Japan keeps growing, which is pretty exciting! 
Also on Wednesday, we had TRC with real Japanese people via Skype. We had gotten a letter informing us of the change from TRC with people here and Skype TRC, but it hadn't provided us with a time, so we didn't know when we'd be doing it. Then, on Wednesday, an MTC employee came in to our classroom to tell us we had five minutes to get to the computer lab to start talking to the Japanese people. Some people were pretty stressed, but it ended up being really interesting. Our video feed worked poorly, so me and Greenburg Choro had a bit of difficulty understanding a lot of what our person was learning. She was pretty nice though, and she spoke a tiny bit of English. She was in Kobe, so she said some things a bit differently, but it was overall a great experience. 
Right now, we're all waiting on travel plans that should be arriving on Thursday of next week. That's pretty much the only exciting thing happening for a while. Also, I was told I couldn't have my name written in Kanji because Earl in Japanese would seem like a prideful title. That was kind of disappointing, but I can sort of understand. I'll say more in later emails today, but I'll probably have to retrieve laundry soon. 待ったねえ！
アール長老

It'll be sad to say goodbye to the majority of my district, but other than that, it will be extremely wonderful to leave.