Japan!!

Hi again, it's Joyce doing another team post! It's midnight in Osaka, and I'm sitting in our cosy 3 bedroom apartment with free internet! Me and dene are having a lan party with the two laptops on the dining room table. jono's in the shower, and everyone else is asleep! So much has happened in the last 2 days, so here's a really really long post for your information/entertainment!

Thursday

8:50am - flight begins!

in between, ridiculous stopover at the gold coast where we all had to get off the plane, wait for half an hour, then get back on the plane again. the process of getting off involved walking about 500m in the heat (with 2 japan winter jackets on, this was quite hot! thank God for air-conditioned corridors when we got inside)

on the flight: eat, drink lots of soda water, enjoy the general lack of turbulence, wander up and down the aisles, watch WALLE - SO CUTE!!!!, sleep, eat. highlight of the flight was when the hugheseses got moved to the front row for babies which meant that between the 8 of us, we had 12 seats available to us! this meant that i got to sleep horizontally on the plane - yay! travel tip: go with a family with a baby!

8:20pm (Osaka time - everything in osaka time from now on... it's 2 hours behind AEST) - arrive at Kansai international airport, navigate through immigration, baggage, customs and figure out how to carry all the baggage onto the subway and to our apartment - this was a challenge with the pram and simeon, but we got there - yay! I'm really loving the efficient and clean Japanese railway service - every 5 minutes!

arrive at the apartment: figure out the japanese bathing system (shower clean first, then relax in hot bath - awesome system i reckon!), figure out futon configuration (the 3 girls have the tatami room with futons - click the link to see what i'm talking about - they're really comfy! simeon loves crawling around on the tatami, he thinks its the coolest thing ever!)

go shopping for essentials at the nearby "family-mart" on the next corner - i.e. snacks for supper, (yay for onigiri!) 

collapse into bed and zzzz 

Friday

8amish: wake up to the sound of massive thunder, wind and rain (the line "I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, thy power throught the universe displayed" comes to mind - God is great!) and also the sound of Simeon screaming ("out of the mouth of babes he has ordained praise?" - maybe i'm trying to push that verse too far :P). then go back to sleep :)

in between: wake up and get ready for the day. breakfast: sweet japanese bread with butter (gotta have my carbo fatty comfort food!)

11am: head to the station to try to get to mukonoso. it's raining, so we buy cheap umbrellas and splash through puddles on the way to the subway. then we change trains to the above-ground kind. (think little red caboose - so cute!) arrive at mukonoso station, head to the 100yen shop ($1 shop.. well, almost $2 shop in today's exchange) and grab useful cheap stuff then head to Mukonoso Megumi Church to meet with Matsuda Sensei and his wife Etsuko and Maiko (CMS Missionary working with KGK - Kirisutosha Gakusei Kai - the Christian Student Group on campus and have lunch with them. Delicious soba noodles and taco-style rice (an Okinawa special)! Then we practiced some songs to sing on Sunday afternoon for the church :)

Sometime later in the afternoon (by this time I was very tired and had lost all sense of time) - sometime around 4pmish. Leave for Seiwa university to meet with the KGK pples there, walked up a really steep hill from the station to get there, but it was a beautiful walk and it was really cold so it was really nice :)

The Seiwa uni campus is very beautiful with autumn leaves and a massive christmas tree! it has only around 500 people studying there so it is quite small. the christian group there is about 20 people - we met with 7 of them today. The students are really friendly and we worked hard to communicate with our limited japanese - thanks to Maiko for her excellent translations! We managed to share stories and self-introduction, and have an awesome study on luke 1! How awesome is it that despite the language difficulties, we can still study God's word and pray and praise God together!

7pmish: Leave for back home, with one of the KGK students who also acted as our navigator through the complex subway system (3 changes!) and also the complex menu system of an awesome ramen shop where we had delicious tonkatsu (pork) ramen.

Then, fuelled by ramen, we got home - hot bath, cold day, tired muscles - ohhh yeeeeehhhh.

Then write long blog post. Then go to sleep. Big day tomorrow! Need to be awake in 6 hours :( 

Current highlights:

Awesome fooooood!

Meeting cool Japanese people and trying to communicate without understanding each other's language

Checking out the Mukonoso Megumi Church

Cool seethrough plastic umbrellas that are cheap and tough!

Current challenges:

Still feeling dislocated with the entire "I'm here where they don't speak English and I don't know what's going on and where I am and I can't read anything and I really want to try this food but I can't read the menu so I don't know what anything is and I don't know which rail line I'm meant to be on and I don't know if I'm doing anything culturally offensive and I want a meat pieeeeeee" thing. Even blogger has automatically changed all its buttons to Japanese because it figured out that I'm in Japan!!

Prayer request:

Please pray for Shuichi (Pastor of rural church in 3rd week) as he approaches shops in the Biwako area to ask them for permission for us to sing carols outside - pray for a positive response!