Michael's Good Experience: Transfer and birthday week... Woo!‏

Dear Family,

Hello! This is Elder Gailey, and I'm 20 years old! It's nice to meet you all as a 20 year old! This is the age that I will return home as! How crazy is that, right? This week was pretty intense, transfers, birthday, Sunday. It's all intense! It was good though I had a great birthday and loved hearing from you all, it's still not quite set in that I'm 20 now, but I assume the second I get off the plane next year I will feel like I'm 20. "Elder Terry is also 20 woooooooo hoooooooo!! 20 party whoop woop!" -Elder Terry (he hijacked my email) so anyways on to the week!

Unfortunately even though I have been in daily contact with aoki he didn't show up to church like he said he would, probably because of the rain. I'm not sure why because he hasn't answered since Saturday night. So this week no real progress there. But anyways, Monday night we had a visit with a member family from another ward (they live in our area but they are attending the Tokyo English ward) because Elder Carlini was leaving. It was actually really cool, they were just typical Utah Mormons, BYU fans, super friendly to the missionaries, it was really fun time. We shared our favorite message on love with them, 1 John 4. It went over really well and they were really nice so it was a good time for sure. We spent most of the next day packing (and me cleaning) up until we had another member visit, but this time they took us out to all you can eat pizza. I was even able to talk to brother Isarai about cars a lot. He's a serious F1 fan so he got me wanting to watch some F1 races. But it was cool because now he likes me! Then on the next day for our 4th day in a row, because elder Carlini was transferring we played basketball with a recent convert (Suzuki kyoudai) at the church before eikaiwa. I was able to take some cool GoPro videos of that with my chest mount and stuff, so I'll send the one short enough to send in an email, it's pretty cool! Other than that it was eikaiwa time.

Thursday was transfer day so we got all ready to go, studied, and headed out to lunch at indo curry. Cheese nan are the best! Dad would love it I'm sure! I'm not so sure what everyone else would think but dad would love it. Then I had to ship Elder Carlini off for a new companion. His name is Elder Spackman, he's from eagle Idaho. He's 20 years old, 6th transfer, not quite a year in, super tall, and just came from sagamihara area. So that's the low down on him. We had the Larsen's that night so he immediately got to eat dinner at a members house which I'm sure was cool. Me and Elder Lobaccaro talked with brother Larsen a lot about different language things this time since he is fluent in Chinese and is learning Japanese. I ran district meeting on Friday and am still enjoying being a district leader. Now that I'm in my second transfer and Elder Carlini helped ease me into it so well it feels natural to do all my district meeting stuff and the other responsibilities, for example representing the district at ward council meeting, and making sure the district runs smoothly. It's been pretty nice.

So the 20th birthday now! Woke up that morning with a regular day planned. Right as studies began I got a call from president and sister Wada saying HAPPY BIRTHDAY! So that was really cool, it made me remember last years birthday when they called at the end of the day and sang to me and stuff, it never seemed like I'd hit this birthday and now it's here. It seems so fast from there to here now, time is just flying by! It's insane. So to celebrate unfortunately I wasn't able to use any of my candles but we went to an all you can eat Mexican place for birthday lunch, it's the only one that we know of in the mission so it's super famous among missionaries, and it was delicious. The sisters gave me some presents/cards and it was lots of fun. Then we had an activity at the church to play rumi cube at the church with some members, I ended up coming in 2nd overall; not too bad for it being a while since we played back home! It was lots of fun. Then I spent the rest of the night on some calls and things, I called all of our investigators and a lot of potentials for church. But it rained so anyone who was on the fence didn't come, which was everyone. (aside from aoki, still don't know what happened there) then after planning I got some calls from people around the mission, like Elder poffenberger, Elder Carlini, and Elder brummett. It was nothing super crazy but it felt like a nice slow humble birthday I suppose. Then Sunday progressed like normal, ward council meeting, missionary correlation, church and then after church one of the members (oba kyoudai) invited us over for dinner and cake for my birthday so we went over (he's in his 60s and his mom is pretty old) and it was very unique compared to most dinners at members houses. It was very quiet, no loud voices, and very calm intelligent conversations it was interesting. But lots of fun and the cake was delicious. And today we went to Costco and then I played some shogi (a Japanese version of chess) with Elder Terry and got destroyed. But it was fun! The apartment definitely is different without Elder Carlini, Elder Spackman doesn't really care about much and is a pretty negative guy, kind of reminds me of one of the popular kids at school when they aren't around their popular group. Just blurts things out that if they were with their group would be funny but around people not of that group just makes them sound rude or something like that. So as far as getting along its not bad, it's not hard to get along with people who don't care either way on anything, but it's a little draining to be around someone who looks at the bad side first and is always thinking of more negative things, it kind of shows me how positive I really am sometimes. Moms smile therapy thing from when I was younger worked! Haha I have gotten to the point where it's almost hard to look at things negatively. It's pretty cool! Really makes it easy to always be at least somewhat happy.

Thanks for all the birthday wishes everyone. It was a great time reading all of them and I can't wait to celebrate all the next ones with you. Thanks for all the stuff in the box and just for everything! Ollie is looking way good! I'm way excited to see him next year, and Kaiden too has gotten way big! It's crazy! I feel like everyone will be so much different... I probably will be too, who knows! But I'm way excited for everyone. I love all you guys and I'm very grateful for all the updates and advice in the emails, I'll make sure to keep praying hard for all of my investigators. Please tell Grandma Weaver and Grandma Gailey thank you and I love you for me! Anyways, hopefully I have more exciting things to tell you all next week! I love you!

Love,

Elder Gailey

P.s. If I forgot to answer anything let me know! Woo!

Elder Gailey wearing Tim's Glasses