Japan 3

Oh my gosh! I'm back! I was dead tired last night and after finally getting the wifi to work after an hour of trying, I was done. And so now, the story continues....

So we went to church at Grace City Tokyo. It meets in a space that they have totally outgrown, which is awesome. The church is super hip! Even the pastor, who is like 50 some is really on it. The service is all in Japanese but they have earpieces that you can use to hear the translation. I felt so cool with my earpiece. All I needed was someone to ask me questions in Japanese, hear the translation through my earpiece, and then i could respond!

After church, I got my second wind. Church and jetlag really do not mix well. With my second wind came hunger. So we set off to find something to eat.

Someone had told Matt that we needed to eat ramen in Japan and someone else, someone who lives here, told us that there was good ramen under the train bridge. So we went there...

It still wasn't obvious. So we made some friends, who found out where we should eat, took us there, and then got us a table! Love doing stuff like this!!!!

It was totally awesome! The noodles were great! Mine, which said little spice were ridiculously hot and Matt's which said medium spice were not really spicy at all. Go figure. I drank so much water, I think I peed like three times between that meal and going to bed.

Yes... very spicy!

Beer. Cold. Good.

We headed back to the hotel, were I proceed to try to blog, but was exhausted.

<<<Insert Sleep Here>>>>

The next  morning.... I woke up. Praise God! Ha, no, but seriously, we got ready, i found out that if we are not careful, suicide is definitely an option from our window, and we headed out.


Let' start with this... Matt LOVES Japan. I don't think that he knew this until two days ago when we arrived. He loves speaking Japanese, meeting Japanese people, and figuring out the Japanese metro. He know like, maybe 15 words now in Japanese, and that is just plenty. There is literally nothing that he can't accomplish here! It's so great!

 Notice the suitcase. Today, we were helping the peeps put on a sports day. Today was a national holiday in Japan commerating when the olympics were in Tokyo. We were in charge of bringing all the stuff for the games. Enter suitcase.

(Sidenote: I am listening to the new Avett Brothers CD, it's really great. I love track 6)

Game day was happening at 10, we were meeting up with the Pfiels at 9:15 but first we needed to pick up some lunch for the picnic after gameday. We hit up the Japanese version of 7-11, Daily.

I got what looked like chicken katsu, beer tea (it wasn't but it was tea made by Kirin) and pocky!

To get to the park where we were to do game day we had to take the monorail.

Did I mention that the day was STUNNING! Absolutely STUNNING!

Pfeil kids, MaryAnn, and Matt

Pfiels, Seima, Nathaniel, two train guards.

View from gameday park

Matt and Nathaniel

Where we set up

People! They came!

All the kids are so so so cute!!!!

The games went really really well, which was great. I was a bit nervous because i was supposedly coordinating them, and everything had to be translated and the kids were little!

MaryAnn did like an easter egg hunt with fun size m&m's which was such a hit!

After the games, we did a picnic. Not only do you have to take off your shoes to go into houses, but apparently onto picnic blankets too!

More pictures of peoples backs.

Omg! Okay, so these people are so great! We have met so many cool people but the the two that I have talked to the most are two ladies named Aki and Yoco. So Aki is super nice and her daughter is beautiful! She has the longest eyelashes and this cute pixie cut! She's really outgoing to fun to talk to. The other lady is named Yoco. Her husband is Kazu who Matt has been chatting with a bunch (whoa, i sound like Nathaniel). This is Yoco's dog. Kazu put his lei around his neck, his name is Toy.

This dog was hysterical. He's so tiny but hasn't really noticed. He was chasing wiffle balls around for like 3 hours.

Anyway, Yoco has a cool story. She straight Japanese but sounds completely american when she speaks. Like you would never know that she was Japanese if you were speaking to her in English. She has two modes, Japanese mode and then white american mode. Matt and I were like, what? how does she do it?

Well, turns out that she went to school in the US for 10 months. But get this, she went to an all black college in Charlotte, North Carolina. Totally love it! She loved going there and really wants to visit the US again. Hopefully they will make it to Hawaii. She has one daughter who is super cute!

Matt is magnet man. Everybody loves him!

The game suitcase and my beer tea!

These girls were inseparable!

 After the game day, the Pfeils, Aki, Yoco and some other dude came with us to see a bit of Tokyo. We went to this cool plaza area on the water and hung out there while we waiter for the boat taxi to take us back to the other side of town.

Statue of Liberty. No one is really sure why this here.

 Kua`aina burger anyone?

Wedding!

The plaza place

 There's a better shot of Kua`aina

and Lady Liberty

It was such a beautiful day

Waiting in line for the boat

Off we go

This is me and Yoco

Then we stood around for like 20 minutes while the "adults" decided what to do. I took a picture.

Ha! I've seen this before

East meets West Tree

So Grace City Church is also starting Grace Harbor Church. GHC is hoping to maybe rent out this restaurant to hold its services... so we ate dinner there!

But before we went for a walk to kill time. It was only like 4pm

Dinner was great! The menu was complety in Japanese and while i know how to say, "What is this?" that does nothing if you can't understand the answer.

Yummy!

Matt's food looked amazing, this place was like glorifed American food. Nathaniel and I had burgers, Matt has spaghetti, and MaryAnne had these sizzling mushrooms which looked really cool.

The place was really neat.

After dinner

we headed back to the hotel. The guys headed off the "spa" with the guys. MaryAnn and I crashed! Well, I'm on my computer doing this... she's sleeping.

So some recap! I love Japan! The city is so modern, clean, beautiful, and the people are by far the nicest people I have ever met. Such a pleasure to be here.

Japan 2

Not sure where I left you all....what story was I telling??

Hmmm... anyway, carrying all the luggage through the metro was really reminiscient of doing in in Paris with Brandon. Difference there was that I was almost crying. This time, I merely ripped my shirt in two places. 

It was a journey. We hit the hotel long enough for me to rinse off and then were off to a dinner at the Pfeil's (a missionary family) house. They work with the missionary, Seima, that we are here to visit. The dinner was great. We met a bunch of locals who I genuinely enjoyed talking to. They were super pumped about Hawaii so hopefully we'll get to see them again after this trip.

After the dinner, we were pretty much dead. We headed back to the hotel and crashed.... until 5:30am.

Pretty good if you ask me, but I thought that my clock was still on Hawaii time so when I woke up, I thought I had only slept for an hour! Such a relief to find that I had actually slept 6 (I am dying right now I am so so tired!)

We ate breakfast at the hotel, and then met up with Jon Pfile. Jon now works in Tokyo but previously worked in Chiba, a town about an hour from here near the airport. This is where MTW first started the Japanese church plants so we wanted to go see a few, ha there are only "a few," of the churches down there. 

Street in front of our hotel. It was raining this morning but it was such a nice break from the crazy humidity.

Jon's car.

Buildings of Tokyo

Disneyland!

Church #1. If I have the story right, one church split into three. This is the original one.

Same church, different angle.

Lunch at 7-11.... espressoda anyone?

MaryAnn opted for a large grapefruit juice.

Me eating gyoza in the car.... I think that I will be eating a lot of gyoza!

I ate this too...

More disney

Tokyo skyline as you drive into Tokyo!

Trash room

I was so clean. It was this huge room of trash.... it had NO smell!

The trash and this lobby are at the Pfeil's apartment building.

Ginza! On our way to our third church service of the day.

Curved building

Illegal diamonds!

Tokyo is bidding for the 2020 olympics. There is stuff everywhere!

I'm falling aslee.....

Japan 1

Hello All!

Guess what?! I am in Japan! My church has been forming a relationship with a group of pastors in Tokyo and decided to send a few of us other there to check it out, meet everyone, and start being their friends. And at the last minute, I got asked to fill in for a guy who couldn't go. So it was off to Japan!

I have never been to Asia before so this I obviously was/am super pumped!! So here are the details.

On the Japan trip was Nathaniel, Matt, MaryAnn, and me. MaryAnn is a flight attendant for United so the plan was for all of us to fly standby with her... that was a good choice. 

We got upgraded. Oh yeah! Great way to start the trip! MaryAnn was riding cool in first and and Nathaniel, Matt, and I "slummed" it in business. Slummed! Let's just say, I survived.

Here is me, chilling in my seat. 

Ah, yes, my feet resting on the foot rest. Loving this pod thing. And yes, of course, duh! The seats were lie flat. I'd had such a hard day, basically I of course needed it.

So MaryAnn told us to pace ourselves with the food. I thought she was exagerating... she wasn't. Nathaniel put it like this, "I feel like a Kobe cow, you sit in a really nice area and people feel you, and feed you..." We are a lot and we ate well!!!

So we started with warmed nuts.... and champagne. Then came the appetizer. Caprese salad, shrimp cocktail, and some sort of sushi roll. I had a lovely bordeaux.

Then the meal came and I stopped taking pictures. I had beef tenderloin with gnocchi and green beans, followed by a cheese platter with port, and then ice cream. I was really packing it in because i was definitely filled to capacity!

Here we are demonstrating the lie flat seats. I think the seat was more comfortable than my own bed.

I tried to watch Rock of Ages... it sucked! Then I rewatched the first half of the Katy Perry movie. Then I tried to sleep. Then it was time to eat again.

Omg! I have to say, for me, this is the perfect breakfast. Yougurt (which was actually good because yogurt usually makes me nervous, meat, meat, cheese, fruit, croissant with a tiny jelly container. It was great.

So sadly, after 7 hours and 19 minutes, we had to get off the plane. We all wished that the flight would have been longer but what can you do. There is still Japan.

So here is our plane. It was very good to us.

And then we made our way into the airport. Pretty standard airport I guess but  I have to say, not super foreign looking. Headed over to customs, I got to go in the pregnancy line... hmm, but I did get through first! We grabbed all of our bags.... we have like 13 I think. 8 checked and 5 carry on! and headed to buy train tickets.

I need to say this. I love getting to a new place, having no clue what you are doing, and then trying to figure it  out. I hate doing this while carrying 200 pounds of stuff. We had two hundred pounds of stuff.

The line for train tickets was super long and you couldn't bring your cart, with our thousands of bags, inside, so we just left it all alone outside. Which was super cool! As we keep learning, Japan is rediculously safe. No one would ever dream of taking, or doing anything like that! Really cool and people are crazy polite. I'll try to get some pictures that demonstrate this.

So from Narita Airport to Tokyo it's about an hour by train and two hours by car. We took the Narita Express train. Great train, great way to see the countryside. And bam! we were suddenly in the Tokyo metro system.

And then the fun began! (I'm leaving... more later)

August 22, 2012

But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"

On the Road

Recap

I am obviously behind!

There were so many things that happened at the end but it got to crazy and I couldn't keep up. But it was fun. Maybe one day i'l happen, but the combo of lack of internet and being behind killed me, but one day... maybe.

But just because I am no longer blogging about my trip, doesn't mean no blogging.

Check out what I ate today, here.