Week 61

Good morning,

This week we had a mission-wide conference where we filmed a video for the earthquake/tsunami that happened on March 11, 2011. It might be an okay video. It might also be really bad. I think my voice recording was okay, but for the camera they told us to look happy while we were singing. I'm not too good at looking happy under ordinary cicumstances, so the super-bright sun shining off the snow while I was trying to happily pose for a video and sing a song that's half an octave too high was a little bit too much for me. I'm not quite sure when they'll have the video ready, but when it is it will be on Facebook. Also, the mission conference is the reason for the two-day delay in emailing.

This week we also had the opportunity to attend a speed-reading class put on by our branch mission leader. We've been trying to support the class by our attendance. We don't have any regular students yet, but hopefully we'll be able to get people to start showing up to it. If not we might have to drop it. It is an interesting class though.

We have a plan to go get some Indo-curry this afternoon for lunch. It's $6.50 for all-you-can-eat naan and a bowl of curry. Definitely worth it. I learned about this place last week and plan to frequent it for the remainder of my time here.

I'm not sure if I have too much else to say. Except that the week before the conference some of the more athletically inclined Elders said over our mission line chat that they wanted to go for a run in the morning at the conference. So being motivated by the opportunity to run with other missionaries, I packed my running shoes and got up at 5am to go run with some hooligans. We couldn't figure out how to get out of the building for about fifteen minutes. All of the main doors were locked. We finally got out through an emergency exit. Ours probably wasn't the kind of emergency that emergency doors are traditionally intended for, but I would qualify it as being acceptable. It was pretty fun. And cold. But I would definitely participate again.

Oh. We also got the opportunity to use the ofuro that they had at the mission conference. It's just a man-made public bath (which is different from a traditional onsen because those are natural outdoor hot springs). I said "opportunity", but it was a three-day conference and the alternative was skipping shower time. It wasn't terrible, but I don't think that I will ever go out of my way to attend something like that again. I kind of appreciate the fact that I have a shower and bathtub at my disposal in the privacy of my own apartment.

I was reminded yesterday by Sister Lor (who is in my current district but also happens to have been in my MTC district) that our year mark in Japan is today. We got here late at night on the first of March. That's weird. I knew that I had already hit my mission year mark, but I had totally forgotten about the year in Japan one. Time flies and life is short. It's our job to make the most of the time that we have.

Have a great week,
Elder Mitchell

Here are some pictures that Sister Lor got of me at the conference. She couldn't do a whole lot since she hurt her knee recently so she just took pictures of everyone. She got some pretty good ones.