Vicki and Randy's Monday Adventures in Tokyo

Konichiwa from Tokyo !
This update edition is being ghost written by Vicki. It is impossible to tell you all everything about our experiences here, but I will share a few recent highlights. Randy and I attended a session of the CPWM ( Cumberland Presbyterian Womens Ministries, for those of you in the mailing list who may not know what that stands for). There were 177 in attendance.

It was nice to see women at the convention from the church where we worshipped yesterday among the attendees. During the meeting, there was a presentation from Lilliana, from Colombia , South America , who is in our tour group. (I have been practicing my Spanish with her, and she practices her English.) We also heard from a Japanese mission worker with Japanese International Food for the Hungry.

Our Japanese hosts had prepared traditional Japanese activities for us to take part in during the afternoon session, which was very enjoyable. We took part in a Japanese tea ceremony, learned some origami, tried our hand at calligraphy and were dressed in kimonos and photographed. (Well, I wore a kimono – Randy skipped that activity and just watched!) We had a wonderful time and felt very welcomed by our hosts.

I thought some of you might be interested in what we are eating here – no, we haven’t tried sushi and don’t intend to, however we have tasted a number of very tasty Japanese foods but do not know what they were called! However, I will tell you about the breakfast buffet, which is a mix of western (American) style and Japanese style food at our hotel.

Here are the choices available every morning. The menu varies slightly depending on which of the three restaurants we visit:

Breads and small pastries of all kinds, waffles, toast, honeydew melon, oranges, grapefruit (not as acidic as ours – lighter in color and very good), kiwi, cereal, salad with bean sprouts and a variety of dressings, Canadian-style bacon, grilled regular bacon (not crisp like we do it), little sausages – different that ours, fried potatoes (french fries), fried potatoes which are cut out in cute animal shapes, fried noodles, plain yogurt with a variety of fruit sauces you can put on, prunes, apricots, hard-boiled eggs (chicken), poached eggs (duck), plain omelets, tiny cherry tomatoes, tiny cucumber slices, rice, fresh milk, carrot juice, apple juice (cloudy – very good, tastes fresh), fresh-squeezed orange juice, tomato juice, coffee, tea, scrambled eggs with rice in them (runny – looks like soup, we haven’t been daring enough to try yet), vegetable medley of broccoli, cauliflower and carrots, fish, and several other Japanese foods which I am unable to name. We usually eat a large breakfast, and then maybe one other meal later in the day. We are definitely not going hungry!

A memorable experience yesterday involved Randy’s and my train trip to the women’s meeting. While traveling on a local train (local means it stops at every stop – there were 21 stops to our destination) a Japanese girl sat by me. I noticed she was using a pocket translator to do her homework – a workbook reading on Death Valley , California . I offered to read it to her, and did. She was pleased. We practiced a little spoken English, and communicated back and forth by writing in her notebook while she used her translator to understand the words she didn’t know. The end result was an exchanging of email addresses and a new friendship in a most unexpected place.

It is 4:42 PM Monday afternoon for you; 6:42 AM on Tuesday here – time to go down and visit that breakfast buffet!

We love hearing from home – thank you so much to those of you who have been emailing us!

Sayonara!

Love,

Pastor Randy (via Vicki)