Week Nine

So, Seth told me that my emails needed to be longer and with subtitles for the 日本語(Japanese), so here it goes! This week has been somewhat more exciting as we actually prepare to leave this place. Our 先生(teachers) have been preparing us more for actually leaving to Japan, which has been pretty nice. We've learned a bit about Japanese 文化(culture) lately, such as how important it is to have shoes facing towards the door when you take them off, proper words to say when starting a meal（ いただきます）and other such things. Yesterday was our in-field orientation, which was fairly nice, just them talking about important things to focus on in the field like how to find investigators and make goals and things like that. It was pretty cheesy most of the time, sometimes overly so. I thought the main speaker was a bit prideful, which made listening to him kind of annoying. It was also weird to see how many English missionaries there were at the MTC, it seems like nearly half of missionaries leaving in the next few days are English speaking, including some going to Provo and St. George. I was so grateful to be going to Japan, especially since almost all the English missionaries seem kind of weird. I hadn't realized that the Japanese missionaries were abnormally interesting people (in general). In the past few weeks, I've been getting to know the other missionaries going to Sendai better, and they all seem pretty cool). It's going to be weird leaving my district behind, since almost all of them are going to Tokyo instead of Sendai. By the way, I'll be buying my phone card today, and it seems that I'll probably be calling you from Dallas around 9:00-10:00 am, so be prepared for that! I'm so excited to head out to Japan, we're all going a bit stir-crazy here. 愛しています！
アール長老

P.S. We finally got our full Japanese nametags! I'll be sure to send a picture later.


I miss being outside with normal people, though at least I'll be in the real world soon enough.


Well, I won't deny that I'm really excited about having good food (hopefully Cafe Rio at the airport, if it's open (can you figure that out?)), we're going to make Greenburg 長老 try sushi in Narita. I'm also excited to be out of the MTC, it feels like a nice prison sometimes. It seems that it will be pretty warm in Sendai when we get there, which is slightly disappointing, but I don't really care, I'm ready to be gone.

Eating for sure, we'll have sushi, but other than that, probably just look for souvenirs and things.


[Zach: What did people think of the photo album we sent you?]
They said they were surprised. Also, all the shimaitachi thought Hannah was my girlfriend, even though I very clearly said she was my friend. (Though the pictures do admittedly make it look otherwise.) They were like "you're (implied quotation marks) "friend" is pretty cute". And they thought I was a world traveler too.