Michael's Good Experience: Hotel Royal and quite a few bummers‏

Dear family,

This week was pretty fast and pretty slow, maybe because it was full of bigger events that took a longer time I'm not really quite sure right now! We went to Fujino 3 times this week, had Zone Conference, splits with the AP's and that about sums it up when you throw in ekaiwa and game night. This week the whole apartment has just been exhausted from working like normal but also having all those other things thrown in making our Dendo hours still pretty weird. Aaannnddd it continues into this upcoming week too, so there will be lots of tiredness. But it's good we all love it at the same time.

So Zone conference this week was way good there were a lot of good trainings and a lot of just alright trainings that we weren't really sure the purpose of. President and Sister Wada though gave some really good ones on dealing with Japanese culture and how there are a lot of things that you can still do (for culture) from Buddhist type ceremonies and stuff if you do it right. And Sister Wada did a training on the Samaritan woman at the well. It was way good, I really liked the way she explained that Christ didn't go way deep explaining things but just taught as simply as possible, making it impossible to misunderstand. In our free time in between Fujino and the other things we just dendo'd near the area of the church because we had ekaiwa and stuff and we found some people for the sisters and a couple for us so that was really nice. We have a lot of people that if we can finally get some follow up with them we will actually know how many investigators we have. We have quite a few we just need to get the times to teach them all worked out.

We had splits with Elder Rockwood this week. He just came with me and Elder young and his companion left for Kofu with 2 others. I think I told you guys a bunch about the AP's when I first got to Japan, how I really liked them and stuff like that. I think he is a good guy but after splits I'm alright with not going on splits again for quite a while. We went to Fujino and met up with Brother Chiba a recent return missionary who we found the Takeuchi family with. So Elder Young, knowing that I have more patience than he does, had Elder Rockwood with me for most of the time and he went with Chiba for most of the time. It was alright I just don't think you should be as forceful as he likes to be in his Dendo. I don't think as missionaries we should shove the gospel down people's throats sometimes and expect them to like it. But that's beside the point. We found a few people that might have some interest. When I went with Chiba though I learned a lot. He is always so incredibly happy and energetic. I don't even know how he does it! He's a way good missionary too so I'm glad to have his help out here.

We tried to follow up with the Takeuchi family and some people around them, on the time that we set up, but no one was home unfortunately. So we tried to find some more people and walked all the way to the previous train station to save a little money and have some adventure and it was really cool. We found a way old broken down hotel that is abandoned! Pretty good adventure if you ask me! But we also met some cool people on the way! Yesterday though we tried to visit the Takeuchi family one more time and they were actually there this time but it was completely different than the first time. She (the mom) came out and talked to us saying how she is scared of electromagnetic waves and how they have no electronics in their house and how she freaked out when there were pictures in the pamphlet we gave them that she thought might give her children an outside world influence. So she is very interesting. And she told us to visit on weekdays in the morning while her kids are at school but not until after Golden Week which is a week in May of 5 ish holidays in a row. So we were really bummed and no one else was home. But we talked it out had a good rest of the day and now it's pday and we are going to try and visit some recycle shops and have a good day of fun stuff to de stress and calm down and be chill.

That was my week pretty much! I hope you guys all had a good and hopefully more successful week than my week! Love you all!

Elder Gailey

Fujino