February 13, 2011

Dear Family,

There is no use for Valentines Day. I’m just bitter about it because I’m a blonde haired blued eyed American in Japan but have to ignore every girl that talks to me. Elder Nelson who also shares the same attributes as me was proposed to by a girl on the train the other day. Another girl later that day asked him on a date. Why won’t these people just listen to the gospel instead! I’m really okay with it though. Luckily Japan is really bad about stealing stuff from America so Valentines Day here is mainly between friends of any gender. It’s not even a girlfriend boyfriend thing. It’s just like anyone. In fact, at work here on Valentines Day you are suppose to give everyone chocolates, or so I hear from my English class students.

I’m convinced that it’s spring already even though it’s not. I told my body it’s spring so I’m just going to keep going with it. I already started sweating a lot. I don’t wear a coat anymore. I started suggesting that we have ward barbeques. I think they think I’m delusional. It’s still hovering around freezing and it snowed this morning. I refuse to change my mind though. I’m going to endure until it actually does become spring. You know me. I’d rather wait for it to get warm than go inside and put on a coat.

I had a pretty classic Jason experience today. I have been told that if at all possible we should go to free places (not internet cafes) to do email. I’ve been working hard and asking everyone if they know of such a place. Finally I got the idea of going to another city in my area and seeing if we could email at their library. I got even smarter and decided that I would call ahead to just to make sure. I called and the woman was very nice but made it sound like I was stupid for even asking if we could email. She said of course we can. I decided it was the best plan. It would be a 35 min train ride each way and about $4 each way but I decided it would be the best.

We got there and walked to the library. The people were really nice and they even let me switch computers so that we could see each other’s monitors. Then we tried to sign in to our emails. We were both really excited. Then we found out that the email was blocked. I went to the front desk and asked if the email was bad. The guy said it was. I was so angry I had all of the angry from every customer service representative that I’ve ever talked with on the phone rush back into my body. I started to think. “What would Jason do?” I decided most of those gestures were inappropriate. I then tried pushing that vocabulary out of my head and repented and finally explained that I had called earlier and they said it was fine. By this point my face was probably showing signs of hurting someone so the woman at the next desk over looked down like she was doing some busy work. The guy said that was incorrect. I walked away and grabbed my stuff and started to walk out. I said so that they could hear, “I guess we’ll go all the way back to Fukui. The guy said sorry. I was nice and said its okay. I wasn’t mean to them. I just showed that it was very frustrating for us. First, I just can’t believe that they won’t let you email. Second, I was told on the phone it was okay. It’s quite annoying. So now I’ve spent well over $10 on TRYING to do email. I didn’t want to go there in the first place because it would mean that it would take us 3 hours to email, including travel time. But now it’s almost 2:30 and I still have to do shopping. I wanted to end P-day early and go visit people but we don’t have enough time. So it’s been a super frustrating day.

Anyway, I’m fine. This week was pretty good. Thiago, our Brazilian champ said he’d get baptized. We didn’t want to set a date because he freaks out about dates so we just got the commitment for now. He is working on getting an answer. We are going to slowly go through the commandments. He needs a testimony before we tell him he has to get married.

Not a ton actually happened this week. We just visited a bunch of inactive members and we are trying to find some that we can meet with on a regular basis and work with them to get them back to church. So far we are doing all right. We have found a couple. Some people tell us that they are Buddhist and have never seen the missionaries but we know that not true.

Elder Nelson in Komatsu met some guys from Siberia the other day. He asked them how the Fukui/Komatsu weather was compared to Siberia (expecting Siberia to be worse). They said they hated the weather here. They said, “at least you see the sun every once in a while in Siberia. This place is terrible.” I thought that was funny and pretty good proof that I’m not making up how terrible the winters are here. I have verbal hearsay from a man from Siberia.

Well sorry this is so short. I’ll be going to Nagoya on Friday to see Elder Holland. Hopefully next week’s email will be more action packed and full of interesting things. I love you all. Thanks for the emails, they are great. That’s the main reason I do email now days because my life is so boring right now that I don’t have a lot to talk about. Have a great week

Love, Tyler