Eric's Mission, Tokyo, Japan

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...