Biwako!!

Ok.. so here's the epic story of the last few days that i can remember.. i've had maybe 8 hours of sleep in the last 48 hours.. so i'm a little fuzzy atm!

Thursday

Team planning and debrief and prebrief day, then Rachel and Ruth go to the Paper Museum in Oji, while Serene, Jono and me go for an adventure to Shinagawa, to hunt down the fabled Segafredo! (did I mention that while we were in Akihabara, Jono and I got completely lost and found an awesome Segafredo that served REAL COFFEE!!!) - we walked from Tamachi (home base) to Shinagawa (nextish suburb) which looks pretty close on google maps, but in gloomy and rainy and cold weather, 15 minutes of walking felt like a lot longer. But.. we found it! Real coffee! So it was all worth it. And we went shopping and caught the train home and packed and wrapped presents and cooked curry and went to sleep very late.

Friday

8am: alarm goes off. bleh. reset alarm for 8:30
8:30am: alarm goes off again. waah! grumble out of bed, wake up jono.
9am: me and jono run to the train station to catch train to Mitaka
10:15am: arr. Ghibli Museum!!!!!!!!! It's incredible. It's so cool. It's the Ghibli Museum!!!! Gawk at animation process, laugh at short animation made for the museum, cry over the soft toys in the gift shop that i can't buy, etc.
1:30pm: run back home to pack
3pm: check-out time!

Today we said bye to Rachel and the boys who are flying back to Brisbane as I type... we miss you already!!

4pm: arr. Shinagawa station. Sit down at starbucks and leave at least one person (usually jono) to occupy that table for us until 9:30pm. (Longest starbucks table holding ever.) Shop. Eat. Generally kill time.

11:18pm: catch the moonlight nagara - an overnight train that will take us to Biwako!

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attempt to sleep

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chat

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Saturday

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nap

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6:50 am: start a series of train transfers that gets us to...

8:30am: kinomoto station!!!! horray!! meet Shuichi and Elaine at the station, eat breakfast, zzz. wake up. fold leaflets for leafleting. eat lunch. meet up with one of the ladies from church. leaflet entire villages re:christmas stuff.

6pmish: arr. @ Nomura's - my homestay family for the first few days here. I feel so blessed to be in such a beautiful home with a happy family - also we had awesome diy sushi dinner with raw fish (i'm starting to enjoy it) and then play with the kids then have a long shower/bath then check email then blog then sleep!

There ends the narrative for tonight. I am very tired. ;)

Thank God for our safe arrival here, all the stuff we could do today, for the homestays that we can be on and for the car that was loaned to us - it's such an awesome car, piccies to come! Also thank God for Shuichi and Elaine, who have worked so hard to organise things and show us around and make us welcome and feed us!

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Moment of surrealness today:

(background story: if not for this mission trip i would be doing a mission week in Tamworth with my home church called Summerfest - one of the things we do on Summerfest is leaflet letterboxes advertising our program. This usually occurs in sweltering heat with minimal shade, although it has once occured in blustery heavy rain causing umbrella breakage)

We were leafleting! Letterbox drop! Except.. it was 4 degrees and sunny with mild to no breeze, and we had to find the postboxes on the Japanese houses in the tiny little village we were letterbox dropping the entirety of. Also we gave leaflets to people we saw on the street - I gave one to a guy holding a knife! (admittedly he was trimming tree branches). But the landscape was so different from Tamworth (piccies to come too) - think a tiny village in a valley, with wide rice fields on one side and woods going up a steep large hill on the other side, with clear running water streaming down the open drains and vegetable gardens outside just about everyone's house! I felt like I was in a Ghibli movie! And the roads were just about deserted and Dene started playing baseball with some of the village kids and every time I yawned I felt like a steam dragon - hard to think that less than 24 hours ago, I was in crazy Tokyo!

I think 2 things I was missing in Tokyo are here: clean air and being able to see stars at night! I'm enjoying the quiet here. But also the cute kids at my homestay ;)