Dear all,

It feels like I was just sending this email out. This week we:

-Missed two trains in a row. We were like 1 minute late for one, decided to wait for the next one 30 minutes later, but it came on a different platform than the one we were expecting, we didn't see it, and missed that one too. It was a rough night haha. 

-Had so many dinner appointments with members. It was awesome. The people in Suwa are incredible cooks. Through that it looks like we have 2 or 3 referrals coming our way soon, so that's exciting. 

-Went to our last zone conference with President Yamashita. It was way sad. I couldn't have asked for a better example and leader than he was. I'm excited for the next mission president but President Yamashita is an incredible man. Keep an eye out for him in General Conference this October, it's been a while since he's spoken. 

-Taught a lesson to a new investigator we found last week. He's this 30 year old guy named Miyazawa who runs his own little electronics shop. I saw shop but it's more like a mad scientist lab straight out of an 80's movie, complete with wood panel walls and giant grey-white machines that look like they're made out of plastic. Think Back to the Future. He's way interesting, he loves black people and African stuff. He plays the drums in a reggae band and wears the hat to match. He has questions about the purpose of life though so he likes talking to us.

-There's a less active member, Brother Koike, who I've mentioned before, I think. He was the former branch president here who was baptized by the missionary who visited about a month and a half back. We've been visiting him a lot and he's been slowly progressing. We visited him last week and challenged him to start reading the Book of Mormon every day and he said he would. When we visited this week, he opened the door with the Book of Mormon in his hand already, held it up, and said, in English, "Many thanks!" and started to tell us about how he's been reading every day and how much he likes it. It was so cool! He talked about how he's starting to feel the Spirit again and remember the things he's forgotten about the Gospel. Really cool experience. The Book of Mormon is powerful. 

Other than that, the week's been uneventful. Lots of meetings and stuff ate a huge part of our proselyting time but it's been good. Love you all, have a great week!

Elder Callahan

Member appointments! This food was unreasonably good.

At one point, this was all the money I had in the entire world.

Yakiniku! You cook your meat on that grill in the middle.

We got the leftover meat from the barbeque. Oh yeah.

One of the members, the Kina family, had us over Sunday night. He loves music so much and he has a million cool instruments. I don't know what this one is called but he played Amazing Grace on it.