Friendly Dinners

Well I have to say God answers prayers! Thank you everyone who has been praying! I'm still kinda homesick, but I've been able to get out of our apartment and walk around and to go to church and talk with others and that has helped so much. I can definately feel the prayers!
Yesterday (Sunday), Becky, Amy, and I just kinda laid around the house for the morning and got settled into the apartment. Around noon Yuiko (Mark's wife) came and picked us up and took us to where the grocery store is and the 100 yen store (kinda like a dollar general but with WAY better things). Us girls met up with Mark and Brad around 1pm for lunch.
We met to a restaurant close by where we were shopping. I cant remember the name, but Amy and I took pictures of it today so we'll be putting pictures up online soon of exactly what we ate. I had raw tuna with rice soaked in vinager and it had some vegetable in it that kind of looked like cooked onions, but they certainly didn't taste like onions lol. Then I also had some miso soup (which was made out of a soy broth). Amy had some shredded cabbage, the japanese form of ,fried chicken, some noodles with a green paste on them (it reminded me of a pesto sauce), regular white rice, miso soup, fried egg, and something that I would kind of describe as fried sweet potatoes.
In the beginning, I really liked the tuna, but I don't know if it was something about the vinager rice that made it taste bad after a bit, but I could hardly finish it. The miso soup was okay. I could tell there was soy in it and I'm not a huge fan of soy, but this was only one variation of miso soup and I would like to try another kind before I pass judgement on all miso soup. lol
Amy didn't really seem to like her meal at all. She didn't have any of the cabbage (although I can't blame her for that one), she did eat the egg (all except the yolk), she didn't eat any of the noodles or the chicken. She did eat most of the rice, and a couple bites of the fried potatoes. The potatoes were a greenish-yellowish color, but if you could get past the color they weren't too bad.
After lunch, Mark took us girls shopping again to get all the groceries we needed to kinda get started. We spent close to 3 hours just grocery shopping and then walking back to the apartment. Some things are definately cheaper than others. For instance bananas are currently 98 yen for a small set. (that's about $0.98) Apples on the other hand are 158 yen for one apple. (that's about$1.58) Fish is fairly cheap, salmon and tuna are the cheapest. Eel, squid, and octopus are expensive. And with shrimp it really just depends on the size of it. You can get everything from fish eyes to fish eggs, from whole fish to just filets. Altho besides fish and some other there really isn't much meat to choose from. They have some lunch meat but its almost 400 yen for about 12 slices of ham. (thats about $4)
We don't have brown sugar, vanilla, or baking soda. Ice cream is extremely expensive, it costs nearly 400 yen for ice cream the size of a small ice cream scoop. Everything else it mainly just depends on what it is and if it's in season.
The 100 yen store has become one of my favorite places to go actually. lol! They have two types of 100 yen stores. One is more of a grocery store style and the other is more for household items. For instance, at the grocery store we can get bread (which comes in 6 slices at a time) and milk (which comes in 1 liters) for 100 yen each. Everything is 100 yen unless other wise marked.
At the 100 yen store that sells more household items, we can get just about anything you may need for the house. We got a bathrooom rug, containers for leftovers, a dishdrainer, a knife (cause we only had spoons, forks, and chop sticks at the house), tacks (to hang pictures and letters on the wall), a laundry bag, to bags to canvas style bags to carry groceries in, wash clothes to wash dishes with, and a couple other odds and edds. Each of the items was only 100 yen each.
An easy way to convert yen to U.S. dollar is to think of it this way. 100 yen is almost equal to $1. So 1 yen is approximately equal to $0.01.
Then we went to church Sunday night. Abe Huber is here with us and he preached on the Fatherhood of God and used 1 John 2:12-14 as his main verses. He did a great job. After church everyone hung out and talked and had snacks. There were four kinds of snacks we had. One was a corn chip that kinda tastes like a bugle, another one that was kind of like a pretzel, a cracker that was kind of sweet that was a wheat cracker, and then there was a circle cracker that was made out of rice. The circle cracker had some other flavor in it, maybe a soy sauce flavor, but it was horrible! lol I won't be trying that cracker again, but the bugle one was really good. Amy had the pretzel one and Becky had the wheat cracker.
By about 8pm jetlag was really setting in, so us girls headed back to our place and crashed for the night.
Today (Monday) was our "day off". We were all up by 5:30am and by 10am we needed to get out of the house. We had already cleaned the apartment, washed and dried all the dishes, washed a load of laundry and hung it outside to dry. (All of our laundy has to air dry, otherwise to use a dryer it costs 300 yen for 15 minutes.)
So we all went back to the grocery store (it's called Life) and the 100 yen store to finish off the small list of things we needed and to check prices on a couple other things. I got Ruthie's birthday present and I got ideas for presents for others too. If anyone would like to try dried fish just let me know...they use them as toppings for their rice.
After shopping, Becky headed for the church to play piano and Amy and I went back to the apartment. We put away the things we got at the 100 yen store and then just chilled. Mark and Brad came over around noon and brought us a rack to hang hangers on and a vaccuum cleaner. Us girls had planned to have an American meal for dinner, and Brad mentioned he didn't have any plans for the day so we invited him over for dinner.
We met him at the church around 6pm and when we got to the church Joe (one of the other young guys that will be helping us with the Machida church plant) was there practicing his trumpet. He had planned to go to the movies with some friends but they all couldn't go so we invited him over for dinner too.
We had toasted cheese, fried potatoe wedges, and fresh salad with an italian dressing on it. Joe came over around 7:30pm and we all had a lot of fun just sitting around our tiny table eating fries and candy that we had brought from the States. We all talked till about 9pm and then the boys went home. They're actually currently staying together, but Brad will be leaving in a couple days to go stay with another family.
Well, that currently brings everyone up to date on things here. Tomorrow morning we're all going to breakfast at Tim and Christine's house to have a missionary meeting. We'll get our tentative weekly schedule at that point. Amy and I are thinking of joining the choir on wednesday nights, thursday nights we'll have Japanese lessons for about 3 hours, and friday nights we'll have music team practice for the Machida church plant. But that's all I know at this point.
Please check out the prayer request list and other lists I have going about the different things here in Japan. I'll try to update them each time I write a blog.
Your hands and feet in Japan........Hannah