Monday's My New Favorite Day - Jordan's first email and pictures from Japan

As you may remember from an earlier post, Japan is 15 hours ahead of us - we are in the mountain time zone.  We didn't know when we would get her email last night but it turns out that the only time they have access to wifi is when they are at their little (you'll see the pictures below) church building and they go there about 4-5 times a week.  The emails started coming around 9:30 our time which is 12:30 in the afternoon on Monday their time.  She is only at the church doing emails for about an hour or so which means she doesn't have nearly as much time to respond to emails as she did in the MTC.  Here is her email from Sado Island - north of the main Island of Japan:

Final week in the MTC/America
-Utah won so the branch president sang the Utah fight song for me
-final testimony meeting with my class which was so sad and we had to say goodbye to the best teachers ever
-some of the Elders in my zone sang for the Sunday night devotional!!

Made it to Japan
-We took a bus, two trains, two planes and then another bus to get here

-FIRST AREA: Sado Island
-took a 5 and a half hour bus ride to Niigata and stayed the night there with the Niigata Sisters then the next day we took a 2.5 hour ferry ride to finally get to my area and then an hour bus ride to get to our apartment

My area:
-Sado has about 60,000 people living on the island and of that 60,000, only 12 are LDS
-We have a way small branch but all the members are really active
-we don't really have a ton of investigators so we've really been focused on finding people to teach
-one of the ward members is from the Phillippines and she's fluent in 3 languages, including English so yay but she is awesome and told us about how she translated the missionary lessons for her grandpa when she was 16 and that's how she ended up being converted
-I'm the only blue-eyed person on the island

Just Japan things:
-they eat hard boiled eggs all the time but the yolk is always pretty raw
-at a stop light, the flashing green means stop, not yield or slow
-there are random vending machines everywhere, even on the farmland of Sado
-Japanese pears are so good, they're not like American pears at all
-ice cream with cornflakes is common here and pretty good
-I'm tall here believe it or not
-public trash cans don't exist here so you have to hold your trash until you go back to your apartment

I haven't had any time to get a bike (We have to get it on the mainland).  I'm using an old bike that's about to break! I ripped one of my skirts getting on...

I've been eating a ton of hard boiled eggs so far hahaha.  Eh they're not my favorite, but I don't hate them. Gotta eat what's cheap and semi healthy!

愛しています,
WUNDERLI SHIMAI

PICS:
1. Sado!!!
2. Our church building
3. Ramen!!
4. District pic with our teachers
5. More Japanese food
6. Japanese ice cream (soooo good)
7. On the plane with Gorner Shimai

Here are three more pictures from the MTC:

 I love how she's reppin' the University of Utah in so many pictures.  She loves her school and her sports.  She couldn't get enough football news from me.  I gave her a game breakdown of our win over San Jose State this weekend and then I gave her my thoughts on the upcoming game against USC on Friday night.  Both had a fair amount of detail and she still wanted more.

Next week's emails should be fun because she will have been there for more than a week so she will have had a full cycle of everything she'll be doing.  I love the conversion story of the Philippino gal who translated the missionary lessons and was converted because of that.  I also like the picture of the little church building they meet in as well as the one with the Japanese food and the fork.

She said that they have to take a bus to some of the places they go on the island and so far the ride time on the bus seems to be about an hour.  She's excited to be in the field meeting the Japanese and sharing the gospel.  She also loves and appreciates the support you all give via emails, prayers, and letters.  Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below or to ask questions if you have any; I'll do my best to answer them or to have Jordan answer them.