Day 4 Sun 29th

I'm surprised by how much I miss Bridget Jones. She was my Sunday afternoon napping buddy. We got up, dressed, and walked to church in moderate rain but we've already bought big umbrellas which are ubiquitous here. We wanted to show up about 10min early so we could get all the handshaking taken care of. Remember how I said we haven't had internet in a while, we were going off of memory for the meeting start time and we were wrong. We got there an hour and 10min early. We just chilled in the chapel for an hour.

It is a very small branch, there are 26 adults and two families are moving in the next month so we're guessing we'll be speaking more than once in the next three years. We had plenty of time to shake hands before the start of the sacrament meeting. Everyone seemed pretty nice, one man knew about the fellowship that Craig has. He said it was very competitive. I think he must of applied too but was rejected (he's doing a post-doc at Kobe University through a different program).

Church is only two hours with sacrament meeting and Sunday school three Sundays a month and then Relief Society/Elders Quorum instead of Sunday school on the fourth. Relief Society/Elders Quorum only meet for a ½ an hour. I think this is because all of the women are involved in primary or young women, I was the only woman in the Sunday school class, so the men must have to take over for a half hour so there are women available for relief society and then they switch back.

Afterwards we figured the ox was in the mire since we don't have a refrigerator or stove and decided to walk towards the commercial district again. We opted for the first restaurant we saw because it was seriously raining by that time. It did not have pictures or models so the waiter/cook (there was only one person working in the entire restaurant) kept running back and forth from the kitchen to show us what we were ordering. Things came out one at a time and there was another family in there so we got to see what was coming a few times. It was pretty good. We had dumplings, fried toast with shrimp pressed into the top, seafood soup, salad, this rice thing that was wrapped in a leaf that we didn't think you were supposed to eat, and pudding that the cook said was onion but either we didn't understand him or he was using the wrong word because it was sweet but not something we could place.

Since things were coming out one at a time and we didn't really know what we ordered, we figured the meal was over with the pudding but the other family also had pudding but then he brought them out noodles and something in a big pot so we didn't know for sure. We also figured he'd bring us the check when it was done. We were wrong. Everywhere else we had to pay first or the waiter brought us the check except the one place where the end of the meal was ambiguous. The other family must have ordered something that had more food. We sat there for over a half hour before we decided to ask for the check – not too bright.

We'd heard from Naoko on Friday that Kobe was expecting weather from a typhoon further south and today we got it. It was raining and so windy we couldn't use our umbrellas. We thought there was a bus stop pretty close but there wasn't and we ended up walking home because we never saw a bus anyway and didn't want to just stand at an uncovered bus stop. We were quite the sight when we got home, the wind was so strong at times it literally slowed us down. From inside the apartment it is still pretty loud and we can't see downtown through the rain.