Still alive!

So here's our essay for today and yesterday...

Saturday:

Wake up and get ready to head to Mukonoso for the Mukonoso Gospel Choir practice at the church - incidentally, it takes us about 1 hour 10 minutes to get there now that we know where we're going... stay there and hang out until the afternoon when we headed to Kobe for the Lights Festival - we arrived early and went shopping at the massive shopping centre that accompanies Sannomiya station. Then we walked with a massive crowd for at least 2 hours to get to the lights festival! In the afternoon, an outside sign declared that it was currently 4 degrees - so it got a lot colder once the sun had set! Then we headed back home to catch some sleep before...

Sunday (today - just): 2 - 10 degrees, sunny.
A packed day at Mukonoso Megumi Church: 10:30 service started, then a beautiful church lunch with japanese curry and rice, then a singing/worship/testimony session where we sang "Consider Christ" and "Highest Place" - lots of thanks to Maiko for organising everything and also to Maiko and Masa for all their translation work!! Masa sat next to me and translated the entire sermon and prayers and everything! It was encouraging to meet with Christians of a different culture and be able to sing praise to the same God together :) What was fun was singing hymns in the same tune with english words ;)

We hung out at church until about 5ish when we headed to the 100 yen store again, and then caught dinner next to Mukonoso station then headed home. One really interesting thing about Japanese restaurants is that many of them have a "vending machine" approach, where you insert money into a vending machine, press a button for the dish that you want, and hand it to the cooks behind the counter! This makes it a whole heap easier for people who can't read menus like us to order stuff - tonight, there was a whole load of 300 yen options at the restaurant and I went "I'm going to chuck 300 yen into the machine, press a button Jono and I'll eat whatever comes out of the kitchen" - and a random button press resulted in a beautiful tempura with prawns batter in soba noodle soup! (Actually it's handy learning menus this way, because the chefs yell out the order that's coming out, so you've discovered both what the symbols mean and how to pronounce it, just in case you like it and want to order it again next time!)

Looking forward to a day off tomorrow! (Prayer meeting on tomorrow night, but the day is free for us to.. mostly sleep.)

Weather forecast for tomorrow: 8 - 13 degrees, sunny, sunrise: 6:41, sunset: 16:46 (days are really short here!)