September 5, 2010

Dear Family and friends,

I wonder if this internet place wonders why they make less of a profit on Mondays because they have to refill the ice cream machine so much. Even though I’m stuffed, I refuse to pay money to email at a place that has free ice cream and not eat as much ice cream as my physical body can handle (my non physical body never gets tired of ice cream. I claim that it’s good for my soul). I have already eaten a bunch today which I will get to later. I’ve decided that carbonated drink with ice cream is probably too unhealthy for me so I poured natchan into my ice cream instead. It’s like the Sunny-D of Japan but it’s not caffeinated and its logo is just a creepy smiley face with a leaf for an eyebrow that is winking at you. It gives me the shivers but oddly enough makes me want to drink more. I’ll get back to you on how Sunny-D over ice cream tastes. I’m still not sure.

I’m sorry I’m emailing so late today. A member took us up to Mt. Fuji this morning. We left pretty early and we drove up to the fifth climbing marker. It’s the highest point you can drive to. It’s against the mission rules to go above six. So he dropped us off and said I’ll be back in an hour, go climb around and have fun. We climbed up to the sixth point in record speed. We cut the estimated time in half and I was even unprepared enough that I was wearing my dress shoes. I can now agree with that eccentric man at Dillards and swear by these shoes. Maybe it’s the injected whatever that he kept on raving about, but they are durable shoes. They just have a little dust on them. They didn’t even get scuffed up and we were going through tons of crap. People were giving us weird looks since I was in slacks and dress shoes but we were still booking it up the mountain. We estimate that it would take us two hours to climb the whole thing. It takes most people 3 or 4 hours to get up and about the same to get down. I will say going down was harder but still if I had proper shoes it would have been a cinch.

So after that we drove back down the mountain. I was reluctant to leave the cool climate at 7,800 ft. Now we are back down in the muggy hot climate. On the way back brother Mochizuki took us to Ideboku. Look it up. It’s the best ice cream on the whole dang planet. I had it the other day when we went with a member to an appointment close by (one of our investigator lives on Mt. Fuji essentially). I will stand by the statement that it’s the best soft serve on the whole planet. Now dad don’t let the term soft serve deter you. It’s sooo good. It comes straight out of the cow with sugar added. I’m pretty sure it’s really famous. You should look it up online and let me know. It’s super good. Some people say “oh I could eat pizza for the rest of my life.” Those people are not anchored in reality and obviously crap like jiggling fat will make it go away. But I will say that I could eat ideboku ice cream for dessert for the rest of my life. It’s soooo good.

Anyway after that we went to a Chinese restaurant. They are nothing like ones in America. It’s pretty much just Japanese food. I had some meat with rice and some sauce that was kind of like sweat and sour sauce but of course it’s not called that. Brother Mochizuki ordered the drink for us so I swore that I’d get his money’s worth so I decided I’d go for the Melon Fanta (you don’t have it in the States but I love it so). I was super sick before I even got my food. I then ate that and decided that I might die. I went to the bathroom and tried to free up any space I could by urinating. Then I just sat on the toilet writhing in pain. after about 5 minutes I felt like I could at least go back out. From there I slowly started to feel better. Oh I also drank 2 cups of vegetable juice. It was way delicious though.

So some good things happened this week. We ended up teaching Suzuki San all of Lesson Two. It was way great. We were just going to teach her a little lesson but we ended up teaching her and her son the whole lesson. It was cool because we gave her Alma 40 to read because both of her parents passed away when she was younger so we wanted to emphasize that families can live together forever. She ended up reading 40 and 41. It was so a great feeling when I heard that. An investigator that actually cared enough to read more on their own. We started to teach and she was understanding everything and re-explaining it to her son so that he could understand. I made a little mistake though because we needed a map of the plan of salvation so I pulled out the Lesson Two pamphlet from a case in my backpack. The case was left by the missionary that I replaced and he went home so he left all of his stuff so I just took his pamphlets and stuff. Suzuki San was having a hard time understanding the names of all of places and in Japanese they might not understand a spoken word but if they read it then they fully understand it. It makes explaining words like “Apostasy” much easier. We were wondering why she was having such a hard time. Then the son was like “hey is this Chinese?” I flipped it over and realized that I couldn’t read anything on the front of the pamphlet (I can read some kanji now). Turns out it was Chinese. I was impressed that they understood about 50 percent of it anyway. The kanji explaining the Plan of Salvation did look a little weird to me. I just thought. “oh wow I’ve forgotten a lot since the MTC.” Anyway, once we got that all straightened out I was reading a scripture to her and all the sudden this giant beetle smacks right onto my scriptures right in front of my face. I thought it was going to poke my eye out or something. The mom freaked out and got angry at the son (it’s his pet) for letting it out. It was kind of funny but it scared me.

I’ve learned a lot this week about preparing someone to go to church. At first it can seem weird, especially to someone that doesn’t have a grasp on Christianity. A couple observations are that we sing a lot, pray a lot, and we seem to randomly raise our hands. Suzuki San came to church and we forgot to mention those things. So it seemed a little strange to her. Every time we sang she looked over at me for the page number. I was like “lady he just said it in Japanese, I don’t speak Japanese you do.” I guess the vocab we use during sacrament meeting is difficult so I just showed her the page number and hoped it didn’t make for a bad experience. She caught on that the numbers were on the wall but only when it was time to sing our rest hymn when we all stood up. So that probably seemed weird and there wasn’t a slot for a rest hymn and I wasn’t listening so I had to ask someone next to me what the number was.

Elder Wilson bore his testimony and so did some of the youth (they do that every sacrament meeting). Then we had brother Nonaka give a talk. He is a convert and a good member so I was excited. He was aware that we had an investigator so I was hoping he’d try to help us out a little. His talk turned out to be on obedience. He then continued to say that he wanted to talk about the Word of Wisdom. I wanted to punch him in the face. We hadn’t gotten to any of the commandments yet with Suzuki so it was all a surprise to her. She didn’t freak out or anything and in the end she said it was fun (I don’t know how sincere she was). Luckily before she left the bishop’s daughters went and talked to her and tried talking to her son. They are really upbeat so it was good. People were really friendly so that was good as well. Suzuki actually knew the bishop because they both work at the same company but she didn’t know he was a member. I bet he feels pretttttty embarrassed about not giving her to us as a referral a long time ago. Anyway, it was good in the end. Hopefully she will be willing to come again.

So Sunday we visited a potential investigator that we’d been talking with. He started to bring up the fact that he remembers World War II and I thought “ah crap this can’t be good.” He says he remembers the bombs going off and I jumped in the conversation and asked “so how’s your car? You said before you were working on your car. Is it almost done?” I wasn’t quite so abrupt but I did try to naturally change the subject fast. I really did ask that though.

I saw a poster of Jack Bauer today and cried a little. I went up and hugged it. I don’t know if it was for the newest season or if there are already advertisements for the movie but it looked way sweet and reminded me of the good old days.

We saw a pizza dude get in a weird argument with someone that lives in our apartment. I guess the pizza guy kept bugging this family for reasons that we know not. He would just stand outside the door and ring the doorbell every so often. Then finally a guy walked out and just started walking away. The pizza guy followed him for I don’t know how far. They were just yelling at each other. The dude kept telling the pizza guy to just go away. Elder Wilson and I were standing outside watching the whole thing. They both left. The pizza guy came back and got on his moped and left. Then this really old guy came out of the apartment and kept asking us if the guy and left. We assured him that the Pizza guy was gone and asked if we could do anything to help. He just muttered a bunch words and then went in the same direct as the first guy that left. It was all really weird. He was nice to us though and I think he likes us. I want pizza.

Anyway, I hope everyone has a good week. I’ve still got some emails to read. Thanks to Katie and my friends, I got lots of letters this week it was great. I sent Alec a birthday package kind of late but can I get an email next week letting me know if he got it or not? I’m worried that no one might ever see that package again. Alec I didn’t put a letter in it. I’ll send one some other time. Yeah some friend I am.

Love Elder Hooton