Akita Week 3 Transfer 1

Hello friends and fam!

Its been a pretty fun week here in Akita! Ill skip to the interesting stuff that i can remember-

Caught a nasty cold on the second:] and was treated on my birthday to wake up at 5AM to catch a 6AM train to our first zone conference in Morioka! Trains are so exciting like wow. Luckily the train ride there is about 3 hours long so I got some solid nappage time that I took good advantage of. We got to Morioka, it had been pouring rain all day and - spoiler alert - it rained HARD all day long and all night long, but we took a bus to take us to the Morioka church building which is usually sweet looking but since it was raining and cloudy that day it wasn't as pretty. The building is just right across the street from a nice big pond/ mini lake with a bunch of swans and pretty trees, the swans out there having a good time just floating and making noises cause of the scary rain. It was definitely the sweetest venue for a church I've seen. 

Zone conference was great, Elder Hoskyns and I celebrated the 19th bday by walking/ getting drenched over to a sushi conveyor belt place where I had some great authentic Japanese sushi! And some not so great authentic Japanese sushi... I had the wonderful pleasure of trying out squid sushi and nato sushi. The squid was a white and very tough and chewy meat, not something Id eat again. The NATO. This is a monumental and must-do for Japan missionaries. It is this infamous food- fermented soy beans. If you search it on google, it looks like this disgusting bowl of snot. So it took me a long and dramatic 10 or 15 minutes to decide to put it in my mouth and then another minute and a half to eat it and get it down with out throwing it up, gagged about 4 times before I was able to throw it back. It was disgusting but awesome!

The train ride home was like 4 and a half hours long. My cold and the long day made me pretty exhausted so I slept the majority of the train ride home as well.

Other than that, our investigators are doing very well, we set a baptismal date with Kenjiro for the first week of May! Jerry is still progressing and soaking up our message, we got him to tear up in a lesson :] and Oshima is a being a bit of a twit.. but we think we'll be able to set a bapt date for him this week, perhaps the same day as Kenjiro!

There's a hilarious, classic, white guy in our ward that made us delectable homemade waffles saturday morning! Stuff like that is rare so i feel that may have been the greatest blessing ever, they were very satisfying.

They dont really celebrate easter here in Japan.. not even the church members do really. All they really did was acknowledge its easter and the rest was just like any other sunday. A bit different but it was still and us americans still valued the message of the day. :]

Been having a lot of success and a lot of fun so far here in Akita! Finishing up getting over the cold today, The people are great and have an awesome district. A bit scared for later in my mission when things arent as awesome haha but Im looking forward to another good week!

And thank you for all of the birthday wishes!! You are all the best and I love you all so much!

Have a good one!

Elder Dallin Robins

PS sorry this email was so long! Dont like doing that to yall

Authentic Japanese family- the Shindo Family. Elder Mailes and I were on splits for the day and were treated to some good old homemade japanese mexican food for dinner on Saturday.