Japan

Nagoya is a very quiet and clean city. I imagine the rest of Japan is just as great. The people are very polite here and bow all the time as a form of respect. It's a bit funny to see, actually. I had to chuckle when we first arrived at the hotel and the lady helping us with our luggage kept bowing low. All the taxis are very clean and neat. All the taxi drivers wear suits. All the cars are waxed and shiny. All the cars stop when the light is red and people only cross the streets when the green man says 'GO'. Very orderly and refreshing.
TP had meetings the first part of our time here and then we were able to see a few sites, eat some great Japanese food, and do a little shopping. The guy who works with TP here in Japan took us to a historical castle--I imagined something like a castle in England, but of course, it was more like an Asian temple...and to his home. He lives up in the mountains of Japan and I kept forgetting we were in Asia while we were up there. It looked like good ol' C. County. His home is an actual tree house in the mountains that he designed himself, actually elevated off the ground.
In TP's meeting on Monday Gary Stevenson from the first quorum of the seventy was able to attend. Gary is one of the owners of TP's company and is now serving as the Asia Area President in Japan. It was very neat to meet him. If you all remember he spoke in General Conference 2008 about looking toward the temple and used the Logan Temple as his example. Will was very honored to meet him as well.


We return home this evening and get to put our house together since we moved the day before we came here. Yes, we will have to switch branches, unfortunately, but I am also looking forward to living closer to members. There are a few families that I have heard of that live in our same complex. We love being in our current branch and were going to keep our move a secret so we could continue to attend, but alas, our secret has leaked. We thought it would be easy to keep a secret since only a few friends of ours have actually been to the house (we live the farthest from anyone), and there were a few key people that we decided couldn't know because of their calling (Elders Quorum, clerk, and Branch President) since they might be obligated to tell us to switch. One of those key people was buying our treadmill from us and was coming to pick it up the day we were moving. The treadmill movers came and moved the Incline Trainer to our new location and moved the other to the lobby so this key person could pick it up easily, but it worked out that he came early and asked to come up to the apartment...Since all of our belongings were packed up I had to brief him in the elevator and he ends with "I'll keep your secret." ! Wow! Really?! Too cool, I thought. Since no one knew about the move we couldn't really ask for help so we did it all ourselves, and it took all day long. By nightfall we were in our new apartment and I get a phone call from my friend who is the Primary President and whose husband is in the branch presidency. "Did you move to Pudong?" She asks... and our secret is blown. :)

In WB news: He is running all over the place and getting into everything. While I was unpacking a few things the morning before we left WB was running all over and getting into everything. After a moment I couldn't hear him and found him in the storage room sitting amongst our vitamins and calcium pills with a multivitamin in his mouth, him in the middle trying to get all the caps off (he can now unscrew lids of things, like toothpaste, and vitamins). In our new apt. the landlord has a big statue of Buddha about the same size as WB that she hasn't removed yet and and W will often stand in front of this statue and have a conversation with it. He sure has a lot to say.