Well another transfer's begun and I'm in another area. Suwa is the name of the city and it's this tiny little town way up in the middle of nowhere in the Japanese Alps. It actually really reminds me of the little town we stayed in in Switzerland. It's absolutely gorgeous, but it's also terribly, terribly cold. The winds reminds me of when we lived in South Dakota, bitter and just chills you to the bone. Everyone says it's been getting warmer, but it's still been between 0 and 10 degrees F plus wind chill. It snowed like crazy last night and the snow all stuck to our coats and hats, so we showed up to an appointment with a less active looking like snowmen. I thought I missed out on winter by staying in Nagoya, but I guess not. Too bad, it was light sweater weather back in Gokiso. My new companion is Elder Henrique Schuh from Santa Cruz do Sul, Brazil, my second companion from Brazil. Maybe I'm supposed to learn Portuguese, not Japanese. He's a pretty cool guy. Pretty chill and quiet but we get along just fine. 

The Suwa Branch is really great. It's about 40 people and they're all super kind and friendly. The Branch President is the man and has so much fire for missionary work. He's also kind of crazy but in the good way. We had a 3 hour meeting with him yesterday where we set goals for the branch and talked about where he wants it to go. His biggest goal was a baptismal service each week, even if there's no one to get baptized. He said we'll just do mock baptism services until we find someone haha. Like I said, he has some unconventional ideas but he's way way awesome. 

Missionary work has been kind of slow here recently, both because of the bitter winter and because of it being such a small, old fashioned town, but we're definitely seeing some success right now. We have one investigator with baptism date and another who we have really really high hopes for. I'm positive things will start picking up from here. 

That's all I have to report this week. Hope everyone is doing well. Love you all, the gospel's true.

Elder Callahan

There was this cool foot-bath sauna type thing at a train station where we had a layover. Felt really good.