Going to Hiroshima to visit Sister Lee's family

As we are waiting for the time to go to the train boarding platform, I noticed we were sitting right by this coffee shop.  Almost thought we were back in the states.  Japanese branches / wards tend to show taped sessions of General Conference the following weekend after the live events took place.  We thought that would be a good time to go visiting.

Kagoshima Branch Olympics

First I was asked to find some games from the Internet such as from "Minute to win it" that can serve as events in the Branch Olympics.  The goal was 10 events.  I tried to keep the costs down for materials needed for the events, so I used things that we already had in the apartment.  A few days later, I was asked to be the host to the Olympics.  So I was busy hosting and Sister Lee became the photographer.  The following are some of the photos Sister Lee took.

This event is to bounce 5 ping pong balls into any of 5 cups.

The above is an event where  2 players play toss and catch.  We didn't have enough ping pong balls so each team can only play with 4 balls.  The catcher holds a stack of 4 cups.  Catcher catches a ball tossed from teammate in the stack of cups.  After a successful catch, catcher takes the top cup with the caught ball and put it in the bottom of the stack of cups.  Once all 4 balls are caught, next player repeats the process.

The above two photos showed the event where a tower of 4 cups are stacked with 3 card borads or stiff papers. The objective is to pull the separator paper quickly, fast enough to not disturb the angle of the top cup and let it fall on top of the lower cup.

The above 4 photos were taken from the event that tests expertise in using chopsticks. Each player had to transfer 5 skittles from one cup across the table to another cup.

It was a close contest.  8 pts for 1st place in an event, followed by 5 pts for 2nd place, 3 pts for 3rd, and 1 pt. for 4th.  The overall lead changed hands throughout the events and it came down to the very last event to decide the champion.  But all who attended were winners because they had fun and got to eat ice cream afterwards.

Another photo of seminary breakfast

Everyone enjoyed breakfast. I was still wearing my apron.  It serves another purpose as my large bib.  Now that I am wearing shirt and tie virtually all the time, I need to protect myself against my slobbering tendencies.

Seminary Breakfast

We got up early Tuesday morning (4/2) to make breakfast for the early morning seminary students.  That's like 6 people in the seminary class and 8 missionaries making breakfast.  We left our apartment at 5:25 a.m., picked up the portable grill from the teaching station, picked up a pair of missionary elders and headed up to church.  The photo above shows Sister Takahashi in the back, not sure what she is doing, and the other two are Sister Orth from Brisbane, Australia and Elder Cook from California.  He was in charge of this event so technically we can call him Chef Cook.  They were making the batter for carrot cupcakes.  Recipe was in grams but we didn't have a scale, so we estimated.  It worked out fine as the carrot cupcakes came out delicious.  People say too many cooks spoil the broth.  Well in this case, carrot cupcakes was raised by a village.  I peeled the carrots and chopped strawberries for the pancake toppings.  Sister Lee grated the carrots. Chef Cook and Sister Orth mixed the ingredients.  Then a bunch of missionaries scooped the batter into the cupcake tins.  Assembly line baking worked to perfection.

In this photo, don't remember what Sister Lee is doing.  Elder Ehlert, our zone leader, with his back to us, was in charge of cooking the pancakes.  Not in these photos, Elder Arnold cooked the scrambled eggs.  Anyway, the breakfast was a success.  The seminary students and teachers had a good time, as did we.  Food turned out great.  We had pancakes with strawberries and whip cream toppings, bacon, sausage, carrot cupcakes & scrambled eggs.

Yoshino Park

Kagoshima Branch activity to go see the cherry blossoms and have a picnic at Yoshino Park.  It is a surprisingly large park.  They have a playground area for kids.  Fields big enough to play games like soccer, baseball, and football.  Here are 2 photos of vegetations in the park.

There is observation deck overlooking the Kagoshima Bay and of course full view of Mt Sakurajima, our local active volcano.

Got to do a selfie.

Optical illusion.  Is Sister Lee walking down and climbing up?

She is actually walking down.

Apartment Checks

Part of our duties is apartment checks.  This is where we go to each of the apartments of the young missionaries and check how they are doing in terms of keeping their place clean and verify appliances, smoke / CO detectors, etc. are in working conditions.  We divided our list of apartments into 2 routes.  One day we do Miyakonojo, Miyazaki, and Nobeoka.  Nobeoka is 3.5 hours away by car.  This is known as our Eastern route.  Only 3 apartments, but the distance gets me pretty tired.  The other route, known as the Western route, has 5 apartments in Sendai (1), Taniyama (2), and Kagoshima (2).  Sendai is about 1 hr. away and Taniyama about 30 minutes away.  Distance wise is not bad but 5 apartments so that can get tiring too.  The very first apartment check that we did 6 weeks ago, 2 of the apartments needed curtains, so we installed them this time.  We also picked up 5-6 futons from one apartment that are no longer used and because they got stains on them, it was not worth the effort to clean them.  We took them to the local recycle center today.  It is free as long as have proof of residency (which we have - first thing we did when we arrived in Kagoshima - get our residence cards) and keep the total weight of items under 100 kg.  Anything over 100 kg will incur a fee, but even that amount is relatively inexpensive.  Here is a photo of one section of the recycle center where we took the futon and broken chair parts.  There actually was a line of cars bringing stuff.  Inside the building, there are 4 stalls for vehicles to unload.  In this photo, there were probably 4-5 cars in front of me with maybe similar # of cars behind me.

District Training Mtg

Today's theme was on "Love", as taught by Jesus.  So the focus on Him as each of us held a picture of Him.  There wasn't enough room to get everyone in the camera shot so we went outside.  It was a little bit breezy as you can see from our ties and pictures blowing toward our left.  It was a very beautiful sunny day though.

After the meeting, we went back to our apartment and provided lunch for the young missionaries.  We served sloppy joe sandwiches.  Remember hamburger buns are rare items around here but we found sub sandwich rolls so we used that instead.  We also had toss salad and a pasta salad. For dessert, banana bread and chocolate bars.  Sister Lee is well loved here.