District Conference

Day 6

Tokyo used to have an English Stake with 4 English speaking wards. However, due to the economy and less foreigners coming to Tokyo to work, they recently downsized to a District with 3 English speaking branches. Today was District Conference. It was the broadcast style, so it was given to all of the stakes and districts in Japan. What was interesting was the person conducting the broadcast spoke Japanese, so we had an english translation over top of him. But when the general authorities spoke, they spoke in english, so the Japanese wards had a Japanese translation over top. During part of the conference they explained why the Japan MTC was shut down, and showed a video of Japanese missionaries at the Provo MTC and how much fun they were having. The best part was the missionary saying he loved the food because he got unlimited ice cream on Wednesdays and Sundays at the cafeteria. I thought of my sister, and how this would be an incentive for her to serve a mission.

I met several more people, and I got invited to go dish shopping this week. This is a big deal. There is one store in Tokyo that has beautiful dishes (I would call them china, except we are in japan :) ), and this week they are having their big sale, so all the ladies in the branch are going to stock up. The one lady told me to bring cash. So I asked how much, since I haven't gotten used to yen and pricing, and she was like, oh as much as you want. In general the exchange rate is 100 yen to 1 dollar. But Tim was like, give us a ballpark, 10 dollars, 100 dollars, 1000 dollars? Another lady chimed in, and she said, oh no! these are cheap dishes, like 300 yen (so 3 dollars). The other funny thing was Tim said he had never heard of this place, and one of the husbands was like, yea, my wife keeps going there. I don't think we need more dishes, but she says we do.



Since it was district conference, it was up at the stake center. We got a ride with another church member so that we didn't have to deal with the trains. We had him over for lunch after the conference. Tim made shrimp pasta, which was excellent.