Sunday: We got word that a typhoon would be coming later in the week.
Monday: We went out to a Thai restaurant. My food was literally boiling when the waitress put in on the table. I naively assumed that the bowl's handle was okay to touch, and burned my little finger. The waitress kindly brought me a bag of ice, almost as if she were expecting that to happen. Silly gaijin, right? xP Also, that evening, a 19-year-old young man named Yuki waltzed into the mission office, wanting to know about English class. Elder Yagui, our wonderful commissarian, offered to introduce him to the gospel. Elder Yagui and Elder Etchu taught him about Joseph Smith and they gave him a copy of the Book of Mormon.
Tuesday: Zone conference. We all received emergency 72-hour kits and get emergency preparedness training. We also learned about teaching the first missionary lesson. They tell us that Typhoon Neoguri is going to arrive on Thursday or Friday.
Wednesday: Yuki came to English class for the first time. He was really nervous about it at first, but he had a good time.
Thursday: Between the wind, the gathering clouds, the atmospheric pressure, and the news of Typhoon Neoguri, it felt really ominous. Sports night went well, though. Yuki came to sports night and made friends with everyone. He wasn't nervous anymore by the end of the night. ^___^ Sister Wada told us that Typhoon Neoguri was supposed to arrive around midnight, so we made sure everything outside was secure before we went to bed.
Friday: In the morning when we woke up, there was a little puddle outside our door and everything else was dry. The sky was the bluest it's been in weeks. And it was hot. And the air was thick. Apparently Typhoon Neoguri hit Okinawa pretty hard, but it died out before it reached us, and we got a heat wave instead. I also started doing video editing. We've been making training videos lately.
Saturday: This was an eventful day.
Around 4:22 in the morning, all six of us were sleeping peacefully, and then the earthquake warning alarm went off on all five cell phones at exactly the same time. Everyone just kind of rolled over and groaned and waited for it to stop. I felt my bed shake a little bit. When we got up in the morning and checked the weather website, it turned out that the reason we got that alert was because there had been a 6.8 magnitude earthquake up by Fukushima...
...but the epicenter was a ways out in the ocean, so it didn't actually damage much of anything. Which is good, because probably the last thing those nuclear power plants need is another natural disaster.
Elder Berube, Elder Etchu, and Elder Yagui drove out to the countryside to look at apartments for missionaries, and I went and worked with the full-time proselyting elders for the day. We spent most of the day in the park. Since it was the weekend, there were a bunch of craftspeople with booths set up in the park, and a number of musicians hanging out, too. We talked to an old man in a Batman & Robin tank top who said he'd been playing blues for 45 years. He was selling CDs out of his guitar case. He had a belt with an amp on it, an awesome steampunk-looking guitar, and a contraption with a built-in microphone that went around his neck and held a harmonica. We asked him if he would play, and he put all that gear on for us and totally rocked out in that park with his steampunk guitar and harmonica, singing and playing old American blues songs. He was way good at it, too. It was awesome. x3
Elder Yagui and Elder Etchu had another appointment with Yuki. Turns out, he read the entire Book of Mormon in four days, and compared it side-by-side with the Bible (which he's read before) and drew some pretty awesome connections. And he's not even Christian.
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