February 23, 2014 Letter

0742 hours Misawa

ohaiogozaimasu! (good morning!)

Life is wonderful here! I got two packages from my mama bear and one of them had stuff I needed and the other had a seahawks shirt I couldn't live without so life is well up here! ;-)

 

Culture Point:

Washing clothes (brought to you by my loving mother). I heard all sorts of horror stories from Japanese returned missionaries about how there were no dryers in Japan or that you had these washers that just tied your clothes in a knot of death then you had to put it in a separate machine to untie it and it was so humid in the summer they wouldn't really dry all the way, etc. Turns out they were not lying and there did use to be all those things. But what we are using now (and I would say most people in the areas I have been in use) is a hybrid small washer and dryer. It fits probably 10 shirts comfortably (you could put in 30 if you smashed it) but the mission mom says for us to do 4 shirts at a time to actually wash them and get any sweat marks off. I end up doing normally 6 and all seems to be well. Anyways, it's very similar to a washer in the states: soap, then you turn on the nozzle of the temperature of water you want, and the machine pulls from it and washes your clothes (45minutes). Then you don't even have to open the lid you just hit the dryer button and it dries them. The one downside is that those 6 shirts take the 5 hour cycle to dry. If you put 10 in probably two 5 hour cycles would be needed. But! we do have a machine washing our clothes that takes no effort by us and if you keep the loads small it works great! You see a lot of clothes lines on people balconies and in their houses.

 

Fun Food Fact:

Anko (bean paste). I could talk about this for hours but I will just give you a piece of the iceberg. It's served and prepared into about 100 different pieces sometimes being the main dish and others times just an ingredient. My favorite way (I love this way even though normally anko is not really my first choice but its always a safe food) is when they take the beans and dip it in a sweet batter (I imagine it being like pancake batter maybe but thicker) and they deep fry it and put sugar on top! It's like a high protein donut! :-) soooo good!

This is to show that Japanese eggs are way darker than American Eggs.

This is Elder Iida eating a raw egg to prove to us it was like drinking water.

 

Spiritual Thought:

Overcoming our weaknesses. We all have a desire to do it I think and we all can do it through the atonement of Jesus Christ. We apply that atonement through the gospel of Jesus Christ, faith repentance, baptism, the gift of the holy ghost and enduring to the end. It works! I know it and want to testify that it works but it is not easy; if it were there would be no growing. The hard is good for us.

 

Good Timber

by Douglas Malloch

 The tree that never had to fight
For sun and sky and air and light,
But stood out in the open plain
And always got its share of rain,
Never became a forest king
But lived and died a scrubby thing.The man who never had to toil
To gain and farm his patch of soil,
Who never had to win his share
Of sun and sky and light and air,
Never became a manly man
But lived and died as he began.Good timber does not grow with ease:
The stronger wind, the stronger trees;
The further sky, the greater length;
The more the storm, the more the strength.
By sun and cold, by rain and snow,
In trees and men good timbers grow.Where thickest lies the forest growth,
We find the patriarchs of both.
And they hold counsel with the stars
Whose broken branches show the scars
Of many winds and much of strife.
This is the common law of life.

Ether 12:27
 "And if men come unto me I will show unto them their ^aweakness. I ^bgive unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my ^cgrace is sufficient for all men that ^dhumble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make ^eweak things become strong unto them."
 

You are weak because God wants to make you strong! There is hope, the more weaknesses you have the more potential, capitalize on them!

 

Funny Story:

Ice cream. I love ice cream and always will and I am always in it for the story so I try everything that I run into. So when our train arrived 20 minutes before an appointment and we decided to grab some lunch at a little middle of nowhere store (if you know what country mercantile or the chocolate factory is it was kind of like that). We are walking around and looking at stuff and there is all these signs for shijimi ramen.. and i am like what does "shijimi" mean? Then we saw the sign that is in the picture! It means clam! That sounds... not very good... clam ice cream... :-p But you figure that the grape jolly ranchers don't actually taste like grape and the crabapple jam kinda tastes like apples but they add so much sugar that it makes it awesome! So at worst I am imagining it will be like milk ice cream all over again.

 

There were 3 signs I should have paid attention to:

1. Please notice the prices on the sign. the vanilla and chocolate are more expensive the clam. why?

2. When I asked the lil Japanese ice cream lady if it was good she would not answer my question; she just said the equivalent of "about that...." and ran in the back.

3. The smell. When ice cream does not smell sweet you are going to have some trouble is what I've learned.

 

I have eaten live fish, I have eaten octopus and squid raw, I have even eaten t.v. dinner fish sticks.

But I kid you not I have never had anything that was just as completely gross as this. Like clams in a blender, add some milk, freeze it. Put it on some poor cone that has to hold that creature. The worst part is 1. it's japan so there are no garbage cans within 100 miles, 2. it's japan so its super rude not to eat all your food, and 3. it's frozen so there is no just going for it all at once or you will get a brain freeze. I think i can eat anything... but yeah, i can officially say the grossest thing I have ever eaten is ice cream. :-)

 

love each other for me and smile!

Law Choro