Eric's Mission, Tokyo, Japan

Hello everyone, and welcome to my last email from my mission in Japan.  The time has gone by fast and my 2 year mission has finally come to a close. Crazy stuff right?  I can't believe that in just 4 short days, I will be able to see mom and dad and the rest of you will have to wait for a few more weeks.  But it's coming fast!  By the way, I'm sorry that my last email is late this week. I will explain later in the email. So my last week was pretty intense.  Like I said, I was able to go on splits with my district leader and we got to eat Taco Bell.  So good!  I'll have to go again soon! Next was temple day.  We were able to meet with a lot of our old missionary friends and to say good bye to all of them before I leave.  We went to eat at a place called burger mania where they are famous for their cherry burgers, maybe we will have to go after the temple session mom and dad!  They are pretty good!  The following da...

Hey Everyone! You know what's happening this week?  I started my last week of my last transfer!  And boy are we going to be busy.  As soon as the Bishop in both wards announced to everyone that I only had 7 more days in the ward, everyone started inviting us over for lunch dinner appointments.  I feel so popular because this is the most member lessons that I have ever had.  Pretty fancy!  But this last week has really crept up one me.  During weekly planning, my companion brought up, hey, so you need to start packing this week.  When are we going to do that?  And it hit me, dang, I really do.  It's going to be fun to try to make my bags under 50 lbs each.  But enough about that, let's get into the good stuff. So last Sunday was awesome at church.  President and Sister Nagano came and gave our ward a surprise visit.  Yes, they are both from Japan but their English is amazing!  We were so surprised to se...

Hello Everyone!  How's it going? I guess to start off, I'll explain the title of the email.  After two years of working with our beloved President and Sister Budge, they have gone back to their home in America.  It was so hard to see them leave and I can't imagine having another mission president for two more weeks.  It's hard to fill such big shoes so I wish President and  Sister Nagano good luck!  We had a conference where the missionaries in the Tokyo area met together to welcome President and Sister Nagano to the mission and that was pretty fun.  Their English is so good I was really surprised!  We pretty much had a big question answer session and after a little bit we went back to our areas to teach English class.  I'm looking forward to talking to President Nagano more during our interview coming up in a few weeks. We also had a really fancy fast and testimony meeting last week and after the meeting, I realized th...

Hey everyone! How's it going for everyone?  We had a pretty fantastic week this week. Actually it was one of the most busy weeks that I have ever had while in Senzokuike!  We were able to find 5 new investigators, teach 14 lessons, and 3 of our friends were able to come to church.  All in all a great week!  At the beginning of the week, I  was looking through my journal that I kept while I was here a year and a half ago and I came across a family from Ghana who was investigating the Church when I was here before.  I just had a feeling that we should go over there and visit them so I looked up their address in the areabook and went. Well the address was totally wrong but luckily I was able to recognize the place where we were and from memory I was able to guide us to their house.  It's seriously so amazing that you can remember things from that long ago.  But when we visited them, they invited us into their home and wanted ...

Hey everyone! How's it going?  Well another week has come and gone with a lot of sweet adventures.  I would like to talk about 2 of them in this email. As some of you have probably noticed on my Facebook page, we went with one of our investigators to tour the Imperial Palace and it was so sweet!  It's in the middle of Tokyo and it is so weird when you first see it because it's just a big forest and lawns in the middle of these huge skyscrapers.  They showed us some of the old guard towers as well as the old Imperial Tower where the emperor lived in a long time ago. Unfortunately, it had been burned down so only the foundation remains today.  What I loved most about the tour however was all of the old stories that they told us.  The first one was about 47 Samurai warriors.  Their master was a warlord but he offended the Emperor by trying to kill another warlord who hurt his honor.  The Emperor commanded the other warlord to comm...

Hey Everybody! How's are things back home?  I hope everything is going great and it's not too hot or too rainy.  I suppose that a lot off you are wondering about the strange title that I used to open this email, so let me simply explain.  It is super hot!  So hot in fact, that even while taking a freezing cold shower, I am still sweating like crazy. The good news is, it is going to get worse as July and August come around.  It may not look that hot on the weather app, but since all of Tokyo is a massive sheet of unending asphalt, it absorbs all of the heat so it is literally like living in a oven over here. But life goes on:-) This week I had to say a very sad goodbye to my Canadian friend and companion Elder Faganello.  I am sending this email to him too so maybe I should give him some compliments so he doesn't feel bad.  Lol. Just kidding I love yah Elder Faganello!  He was a great companion and we had so much fun toge...

Well the final die has been cast.  I just got my very last transfer call in Japan.  Elder Faganello will be transferring to Tsukuba and I will be staying in Senzokuike for my last transfer and my new companion will be Elder Hardy.  It's really funny because I was his district leader 3 transfers ago when I was in Togane with Elder Lee.  He is a really hard worker, so we will be flying like rockets this transfer! Oh, and one more thing, do you remember Elder Free my MTC companion? Well, he will be staying in the same apartment as me for our last transfer together!!  I was so excited to find out about that!  We are starting our mission together and ending it together!  I guess we'll get to see how much we have changed these past 2 years. Well enough about transfers, let's talk about last week.  It started out amazing!  We were able to find 2 new investigators right off the bat. It will be interesting to see...

Hey Everyone! Sorry to keep you waiting for the weekly Stevens' report this week.  We had our end of the transfer temple pday today so we had pday on Tuesday this week.  I'll tell yah, it's so nice living really close to the temple.  In Togane, we had to wake up very early in the morning to get there on time for the session.  But this time, we woke up at 6am and rode our bikes there.  The temple was a soothing experience as always. After the temple, my companion and our apartment mates, and I went to the big shopping town of Ikebukuro to visit the Pokemon Center there. Ever since I arrived in Japan, people have asked me if I have visited the Pokemon Center yet and I never had.  So we visited it today.  It was pretty cool, but I didn't get to look that much because I noticed that a young lady was staring at us, so I just had to talk to her.  It's a good thing that we did because she had lots of interest in the gospel a...

Hey Everyone! As you can see from the title, the transfers are already coming to a close!  Only 2 weeks left till we get the call to see if my companion and I stay together.  I hope so because we have had lots of fun together.  It's been a great transfer so far and I'm excited to see what happens for the next 2 weeks! Last week we went back to Odaiba and got to see some cool things that we missed last time.  They have a big transformer statue outside of a huge transformer mall and I just had to get a picture of me giving it a Book of Mormon.  It goes really well with the picture that Andrew took with the Book of Mormon overlooking Taichung city.  I'll send it to you today.  This may be a little boring for some of you, but it was amazing for me.  They had a Krispy Kreme on Odaiba too.  As soon as I saw the advertisements for it, I just had to go and I bought a dozen doughnuts, for over $16.  They are so expensive here but ...

Hello Everyone, In case you were wondering, we have meet a hero as the title suggests.  I'll talk more about it later, but I just wanted to get that out there so you weren't too confused. What happened this week?  It was mostly just a normal week.  We had our stake conference this week for the English ward.  Next, I guess something that was fun that happened this week is we had a typhoon.  We had 2 appointments set up in the evening but almost simultaneously both of the people called us and promptly canceled their appointments because of the typhoon that was going to be coming in the next few hours.  We looked up the weather on our iPads and it said that it should be fine so we thought that the people just didn't want to meet with us.  So we decided to go venture out in the farthest part of our area, about a 45 min bike ride that we have never been to before.  When we got there, we started contacting until we started to feel some rain dro...

Hello Everyone! To start off the email, I would just like to make a shout out to the Mothers that have really effected me in my life.  Mom, of course, Grandma Stevens, and Grandma Kaldahl.  Thanks for always being there for me and spoiling me as a mother or grandmother.  It's been a great life so far, and I am excited to see you all again soon.  I hope that you had a great, wonderful, amazing Mother's Day. For my Mother's Day it was amazing to be able to skype with my family. It's been five months since I have been able to do that and the time has flown by.  The time just seemed to go too fast.  I can't believe that we were talking for an hour.  But I guess all good things have to come to an end.  Besides seeing everyone, I especially liked singing the song "Secret Prayer" together in Spanish.  Music always really gets me.  I guess I'm just a musical person, but whenever I hear a song like that, the memories just come flo...

Hey Everyone! I'm back!  Yeah that's right, I'm back in the largest city in the world and having a blast.  My companion is awesome!  We get along so well!  We have the same sense of humor and he is almost as sarcastic as me. The past few days have been so fun just going on adventure after adventure in this huge city, talking to people, meeting with less actives and recent converts, and just laughing with each other.  I can definitely tell that this is going to be a sweet transfer.  His name is Faganello Choro and he is from Victoria, Canada.  I just keep working with people from everywhere but America. Our apartment is really cool as well.  We have Elder Nukaya from Idaho, who was in my zone when I was a zone leader in Tsukuba.  He is super hilarious as well, and at night we just joke around and tell old dendo stories.  It's really cool because we have a lot of old missionaries in our apartment right now....

Hey Everyone! Well guess what, it's that time again to say goodbye to another area. Yep that's right, we had our transfer calls and I am leaving the rolling hills and the rice fields of Togane to head into the concrete jungle of Tokyo.  I was called to serve in the Senzokuike Ward which is the Japanese Ward that is in the same church building that the English speaking 2nd Ward goes to.  It's very ironic because the 2nd Ward was my first area that I served in and the missionaries from there and Senzokuike live in the same apartment.  So technically I am going back to my first area, but to speak Japanese instead of English. So I will be finishing my mission serving in the same place I served when I first began.  It's funny how things work like that.  I will be working with a new missionary.  He is from Canada and is a transfer 3, so I get to follow up train again.  For the past three transfers I've been working with transfer 3 mission...

Hey Everyone! You'll never guess what we did today.  We had our temple pday in Tokyo. Afterwards, my friends from our district and I decided to go on an adventure.  I haven't really done too much touristy stuff in Japan so we decided to go all out.  We took a day trip to Odaiba.  It's a little man-made island that used to be a huge military base but it was recently turned into the biggest tourist hotspot in Japan.  You should look it up!  We went to a really cool mall and visited a trick art museum.  For those of you who don't know what that is, it is a museum where all the art is 3-D so you can take pictures of yourself inside the picture.  I usually don't like taking pictures, but I made an exception for this because it was so neat.  I have them all on my camera so I have to transfer them to the iPad before I send them, but I'll make sure to get those to you asap.  While we were at the museum we saw Legolan...

Hello Everyone! How has your week been?  I've heard that there was a ton of rain last week.  We had quite a bit as well so I guess we are in the same boat.  But you know what they say, April showers being May flowers.  I wonder if they have pretty flowers in May over here or if they are all gone with the cherry blossoms.  This week wasn't very eventful lesson or teaching wise, actually it was one of the  slowest weeks on my mission, but we still had lots of fun and had a great spiritually uplifting session of General  Conference.  We had to take an hour and a half train ride to get to the conference so it was really hard to get investigators there to watch it.  We watched it with everyone in mind though, so the next time we meet them we will be sure to show them our favorite talks.  What was up with all the talks about getting married?  It was so awkward for me because I was sitting right next to the sister missionar...

Hey Everyone! How was your week?  Mine was pretty fancy not ganna lie!  It all started with a wonderful sign of Spring, the cherry blossoms!  They started blooming a couple weeks ago but this week they were out in full force!  Do you know what the cherry blossoms symbolize?  I didn't either until this week.  The cherry blossoms always bloom when the good spring weather is about to start.  I guess sorta like groundhog's day except more accurate.  So when they bloom it symbolizes the start of a new year.  Or a new beginning if you will.  They also have another meaning though.  The Sakura blossoms only last for a week before they die and turn into green leaves.  So to the Japanese people this means that you need to enjoy all good things while you can because they won't last.  And the Japanese people certainly did enjoy the cherry blossoms before they faded away.  The festival was jam packed while I was the...

Hello Everybody! As you can tell from the email title, I can finally just wear my short sleeve shirts with no jacket again!  I discovered this momentous occasion a few days ago when I was walking around a Japanese cherry blossom festival held in Togane with an investigator.  I started off the journey with a jacket but then the sun came out and it was just way too hot!  The weather is just beautiful right now and I love it!  Too bad in just 2 months it will be back to being blazing hot and muggy all the time.  I definitely don't miss those times. So like I said earlier, we had our cherry blossom festival last weekend here in Togane.  We went up there with a friend of ours named Y....  He owns a tofu restaurant so we went there to eat right before the festival.  Did you know that they have hundreds of different types of tofu dishes?  Well, I certainly didn't!  Pretty much as soon as we walked in, he started giving us t...