Week 82

Good morning!

Japan has been pretty hot lately. This week my companion almost died because of how hot it was. We were just out and about doing things that might be expected of Mormon missionaries trying to share the gospel in Japan, when I thought it might be a good idea to look my companion in the face. I'm not too familiar with medical terms, but he had some pretty advanced stages of "the temperature is so hot that I want to go back inside and sit in front of the air conditioner" syndrome. I think that's also known as heat exhaustion. Anyway, we went and got a couple liters of sports drinks and juice at the nearest convenience store and sat in the shade for a few minutes. I think he's fine now.

Our friend Shibata is planning on getting baptized this week! He's one of my favorite people. We met him for the first time three or four weeks ago, but we've met with him almost every day since then. He's so great and I'm so glad that he's choosing to follow the example of Jesus Christ by joining his church and being baptized! He's pretty funny too. This week he asked us "Are you guys not allowed to wear deodorant?". Then he gave us some deodorant. Apparently we smelled pretty bad. For the record, we are allowed to wear deodorant and we apply it daily. It's just kind of hard to smell good when our primary form of transportation is riding a bicycle through the blazing hot sun.

Sometimes we get other forms of transportation than bicycles. Like walking. Usually that's only when our bicycles are broken. Like right now. I don't remember if all of the bikes that I've broken have made it into these emails, but this is probably the fourth or fifth bike that I've broken. This is probably the worst one so far. In the past it's mostly just been broken axles and bent wheels. This time was the frame. Another thing worth mentioning is that I haven't actually crashed on any bikes. I'll just be riding along and my bike will fall apart. I think this was the fastest I had been going too when my bike decided to stop cooperating. We were borderline late for meeting up with some other missionaries so we were going a little bit faster than normal when we hit a small bump and I felt it pop. My first thought was that it was the axle because I've broken multiple axles and it felt pretty similar. Interestingly, this pop was followed by an unfriendly grinding noise and a bit more braking than I had called for. I later realized that my weight would have basically been resting on one side of the back brakes when it snapped. It was pretty fun, though not something that I would necessarily recommend to friends.

Another funny thing this week: We have an English student that wanted to teach us about some Japanese culture so we talked about the zodiac calendar. He wrote out all the animals and stuff on the board and then wrote at the top "Let's ask girls what their zodiac animal is!". The idea being that we can avoid directly asking their age but still figure it out pretty easily. It sounded like some pretty good life advice to me. :)

I love you all! Have a great week!
Elder Mitchell

I also attached a pretty cool graphic that familysearch sent me. Families are great and I'm so grateful for my family and their faithfully emailing me every week. I love them so much.