Week 15 in Japan: Memoirs from Partyville

And another week is gone. It's weird to think that next month I will be approaching the 6-month mark. Time is moving too fast for my liking. This past week has been pretty productive, we've been finding quite a few people who want to listen to our message. It makes up for the fact that a lot of appointments have been falling through.  Fujisawa is such a fun area, it's so pretty and the people here are so nice. Our apartment is an absolute mad house, it's a good thing my mother taught me how to clean or else this place would be so gross. It should be illegal to be having this much fun. It's becoming harder and harder to write emails because there's so much that happens every week. 

While going door to door looking for people, we had a rather large man come to his door in a towel, except it was more of rag he was holding over his... Well, yea... But he was a nice guy who was cool with us dropping by again! 

Also, it was totally serendipitous how it happened, but while street contacting I somehow ended up skating with a group of Japanese dudes while we talked about The Gospel. They ended up not having much interest in our message, but they were cool with meeting up to eat and hang out sometime!   

One big thing I learned this week was the importance in not only serving, but also how you serve. In our apartment, I've found myself doing the mass amount of cleaning because, well, I hate living in a dirty apartment. I found myself getting more and more frustrated and really wanting to lash out at the other Elders in the apartment for not helping out. I then came to the realization that I live with my zone leaders and my companion is our district leader. Those prep times we have to get cleaned up and organized in the morning and at night are busy for them. They have trainings to prep and other missionaries to contact and check on. I realized how selfish it was for me to have those negative thoughts when what I was doing was taking a burden off their shoulders as they try to fulfill their calling. In that moment I gained a much more appreciative stance on the extra opportunity I had to serve. I think at times we expect appreciation from others for the mere acts of service we do, when in reality we should appreciate that there are opportunities for us to serve. When we help others, we should do it out of love, rather than for personal gain. Just a thought.    

There's so much I'd love to tell you but we're off to go to the driving range cause the wind canceled our trip last week.   

1. The children in The Ward made me a Pikachu!

2. Super Janken. You get used to it after a while, this is how we make decisions in the apartment so it gets played pretty frequently. 

3.  Cherry Blossom season is about to begin!

Week 14 in Japan: Fast Times at Tsujido High

Well, time as a missionary still doesn't make sense. Time has been cruising. This past Sunday we were lucky to hear from Elder Holland instead of having our regular Sunday meetings. He was speaking in a church out in Chiba but they broadcasted it. Our investigator attended and absolutely loved it; he even scheduled our next lesson afterwards, which really caught us off guard. Usually missionaries have to take the initiative on that one. We're so excited for this guy; he's such a kind, down to earth dude and is excited to learn. We've got 2 other people we've started to break ground with, and tomorrow we're meeting up for a church tour with a guy from China, except he's not very good at Japanese... Good thing he's fluent in English though!

Fujisawa is an incredibly beautiful place, part of our area is a place called Tsujido, which is kind of your classic beach town. A lot of the people we meet there love to talk, and it's such a pretty place. We’ve been doing a lot of work down through there and we've been finding a lot of success. It's only a 30-minute bike ride from Shonandai and the route goes along the river and through a bunch of farms. It's a fun transition to go through all these fields and suddenly there's city, then the city ends and there's a giant park, and then the beach. No complaints. 

Elder Poff and I have just been going to work and having so much fun doing it. Nothing too crazy has really happened this week, but we’ve just been super productive. I'm exhausted and I absolutely love it.  Anyways, were about to go to a driving range and Elder Magaña is betting money that he can send a ball farther than me, so... Love you all!  

 愛しています、  Elder Cuff   

Words of the Week: 

オペレーション (operēshon) Operation 

狼 (Ookami) Wolf 

戦隊 (Sentai) Squadron 

ダイナマイト (Dainamaito) Dynamite 

愛 (Ai)  Love   

The Beach and Enoshima Island

Side note from the mom: I asked Elder Cuff why there were no people on the beach. I was concerned that it was fenced off for a reason and a perfectly good beach was going to waste!

He replied, "The particular day we went was very cold and windy. This was a painful picture to take because sand was going everywhere and, well, got everywhere. I still find some in my ears every once in a while. I couldn't blame them."

Week 13 in Japan: Starsky & Hutch?

Guys, we biked through a BAMBOO FOREST to visit a 

member. Guess what was at the end of the bamboo forest?

 Why, a Shrine of course. 

So first the big news: I am now in the amazing land of Fujisawa and my new companion is Elder Poff, he loves to work hard, he's from Beaverton Oregon, he's hilarious, loves to party, and I'm so excited to work with him. All right, got that out of the way.

 

The Zone, Myself and Poff 長老 tried to look like 

Starsky and Hutch, but I think we did it better.

For starters, Fujisawa is a lot prettier than Machida. Machida was a very downtownish area with lots of big towers and was constantly busy. Plus lots of hills. Fujisawa is pretty flat, but a lot more green, a bit rural, and the people here are much less busy! Plus we can see Mt.  Fuji from this part of town.

見よ、富士山。

I got here Thursday and we already had a lesson on Friday. This particular investigator is a super happy guy who loves American football. You read that correctly, he follows The NFL and college football; his favorite team is the Arizona Cardinals.  But it was his first lesson and he's so excited to learn. We've got some other people we're working with and its been keeping us busy.

The ward here is absolutely amazing. They're really excited about the fact that I'm from Vegas, and they're such a relaxed, down to Earth, group of people. I can't blame them though, most of them live by the beach. 

We got to play soccer at this really nice indoor facility that was on the 7th(?) floor of this building in downtown Ebina. It was sweet, I’m sorry I don't have a picture of the view, but one side of the place was all windows so you could see all the way to downtown Tokyo while playing soccer. There are a lot of Brazilian people in Japan and the event was specific for some of them to come together and just have fun. It was so legit.

I'm seriously so stoked for this transfer. We’ve got people to teach, the ward is absolutely legendary, I'm comfortable with the language, and the dudes I live with are a bunch of clowns.  I'm surrounded by blessings, I can't complain. The people, the culture, the food, the work, I'm madly in love with it all. In all honesty, I'm living the dream.

Conveyor Belt Sushi feat. Elder Dowdle. This place is 

a 5 min walk from our apartment and each delectable 

plate of sushi is $1. We ate a lot. 

Thanks for all the love and support, just know I love each and every one of you individually, you’re awesome!  

Party hard or hardly party, 

カフ長老

Maps from Mom

 I know it's a bit blurry, but that's the way it came to us. This is a screenshot of a pdf file Eric's mission president sent us when he first arrived in Japan. I haven't spent enough time to figure out how to upload a pdf to the blog so I finally took a screenshot and uploaded it as a picture. 

I then zoomed in to include Elder Cuff's first area and his newly assigned, second area. He has been serving in the Machida 1st Ward and is now being transferred to the Fujisawa Ward. Apparently, they ship their luggage down (no, I don't know by what means), but they take their bike on the transit system with them. From what Eric said, they break their bike down and put it in a bag that they can take with them. Makes sense to me as so many people use bicycles as a preferred means of transportation.

Just out of curiosity, I tracked down the address of his current ward building (Machida 1st Ward) and found the nearest address I could to his new one. The exact address as on record with lds.org was not acceptable to google maps. 

I just wanted to see how far his transfer is. The mission itself is not very large geographically. Below is the screenshot of google maps' results. 

I even did the Mom thing and googled his new area. I found a magazine article about the top 10 places to live in Japan. (You can find the article here.)

"1. Fujisawa (Kanagawa Prefecture)
Taking home the top spot is Fujisawa, the coastal city in Kanagawa which includes Enoshima Island. Fujisawa combines the relaxed atmosphere you’d expect from a beach town with extremely convenient public transportation, as a train ride from Enoshima Station to Shinjuku, in the heart of Tokyo, will take you less than 30 minutes. Add in centuries-old temples, colorful local legends about fearsome dragons falling in love with beautiful princesses, and breathtaking sunset views of Mount Fuji, and it’s easy to see why Fujisawa is loved not just by housewives, but by anyone who can appreciate nature, history, or just the relaxing sound of the waves."

Humm...what about someone working hard to share God's word?

Week 12 in Japan: Japanese Fiesta

We received out transfer emails this week, and it turned out to be a total curveball. Everyone was guessing I would stay and Elder Sakae would be transferred, but it turned out to be the other way around. I have been assigned to Fujisawa, which sounds sweet cause we're not too far away from the beach and spring is starting up. My new companion is Elder Poff. Like Elder Sakae, he's a young missionary who's just a couple transfers ahead of me. I don't know too much about him except that he's American (weird), and super 楽観的 [optimistic]. Sounds good to me!

My new area is apparently pretty flat which will be weird coming from the hills of Machida. That kind of upsets me cause, I'm gonna be honest, my legs have been getting jacked. But I won't be riding my bike for the next week or so anyway, so it's all good. I wrecked my bike. The front wheel is bent so I've gotta buy a new one which will take about 10 days to get in. No worries though, I’m physically fine, but my ego is a bit shot cause I ate pavement in front of a group of kids coming home from school... All the little Japanese children laughed at me...   

Saturday night we had a taco party and invited a bunch of people. A couple of our investigators came out and we just partied for the night. Also it turns out my Mexican friend Elder Magaña has no idea how to make tortillas. I'm beginning to question the authenticity of his ethnicity. But all jokes aside it was a great night, Elder Sakae and I had a ping-pong tournament with everyone, and that got absolutely wild. These people take their ping-pong seriously.   

Sunday was a super sad day, I had to say goodbye to all the amazing people of the ward. But the hardest goodbye was our investigator Matsuda-San. He's such a kind soul, I'm gonna miss him like crazy. But I know I'm needed elsewhere and that's okay, Elder Sakae will take care of him.

All I know is by this coming Thursday I'll be in a different place and sleeping in a different bed. But the work doesn’t change and the laughter never ends. It's so great coming home everyday and being able to tell myself, "Today was a good day." I'm not saying it’s not stressful, or that I don't ever get discouraged. But I am saying that the down moments are the best moments. They humble you, they make you grow. If something starts to suck, get excited. Get freakin pumped. By the end you'll have learned something new, something about yourself that you never knew before, and I promise you’ll be stronger because of it. Sorry for how cheesy that was but its true.    Make it easier on yourself and others, serve one another, love one another, and smile while doing it. Life is meant to be enjoyed, not just endured. 

 

Sincerely, 

Elder Cuff   

I've got pictures this week! There are some blooming flowers, a steak dinner, the hills of Machida, and the homies at the taco party.