March 13, 2012

March 13, 2012

Fam!

I have 10 minutes...

I'm sitting in my new apartment in my new area. Yesterday was transfers... thus no e-mail. Brother Nakayasu really did get baptized on Sunday. It was great. It was his birthday too. The meeting was wonderful and a lot of ward members were teary eyed. I think it was emotional to see that family sitting all together in church, and also to think about the earthquake being a year ago. Sacrament meeting right before his baptismal service was really good too, so it all just sort of piled up on them I guess. Anyway, it was a wonderful way to leave the ward.

I don't know if I will ever love a place or a people in Japan as much as I love them. I surprised myself by not feeling sad at all when I said goodbye to them. I thought about that later and decided it's because A) I plan to keep in contact with a lot of them, and B) I felt like I had done what I came there to do. I don't have any regrets about the work I did there. That sure feels good.

Friday a ward member drove us and Handa in her car to a really famous place called Nikko that's in the Utsunomiya area. We visited a whole bunch of old stale-smelling shrines with gold Buddah statues inside.

Saturday was Stevenson Shimai's birthday. I think it's part of my mission calling to be with people on their birthday...

I'm attaching a picture of what I look like and wear when it is raining outside ... pretty scary. I don't necessarily feel like an Ambassador of the Lord like that.

More baking: we had a chocolate cake in the fridge from about 2 weeks before, and we tried to bake a chocolate cake in our rice cooker because we don't have an oven, but that didn't work so then we had 2 bad chocolate cakes, so we crumbled both of them up in a bowl, spread half the crumbles in the bottom of a Tupperware container, mixed the rest of the vanilla ice-cream we had in the freezer until it was smooth and spread that on in a layer, and then sprinkled the rest of the cake on top and froze it all. Served it at the baptism on Sunday. Best ice cream cake I've ever had.

 Love you all,

-Waite Shimai