日本あいしています！

This week was quite eventful. To begin, WE GOT OUR TRAVEL PLANS! :) We leave August 26th which is next Monday at 6:00 a.m. Which means we have to leave the MTC by 2:30 a.m. Fun right? Then we fly to Dallas, and from Dallas we fly to Tokyo, and from Tokyo we fly to FUKUOKA JAPAN!!! We'll arrive in Fukuoka Japan Tuesday night at 7:00 p.m. So we basically have a full 2 days of traveling. And the time zone difference is something like 15 hours so we're all super excited for that jet lag. It's gonna be great. Other exciting news of the week is that we finally got to hear an apostle speak! Tuesday night at the devotional we were all just sitting there waiting for the speaker to come, and no body knew who was coming. Then everyone down in front began to stand up. We stand up and squint into the distance to see who will be speaking to us and in walks Richard G. Scott! You could literally feel his presence as he came in. In all our 8 weeks of being here this was our first time hearing from an actual apostle. Before he even sat down, half of us had tears in our eyes. He spoke to us all about prayer and it was exactly what we all needed to hear. He also bestowed an apostalic blessing upon each of us there that was trying to learn a language. He said that he blessed us with the ability to be able to speak and learn our languages if we would have sufficient faith. He said this twice during the devotional too! It was just what we all needed to hear. With our departure date coming so soon, we've had a lot of nerves and frustrations with the language and lack of confidence in ever being able to speak it once we're in Japan. Elder Scott's words really boosted our spirits and gave us the motivation that we needed during these critical last days here. This past Wednesday, our district was assigned to host the new missionaries coming in. It was such a fun experience! Also somewhat nostalgic and sad as we got to watch these brand new missionaries say goodbye to their families. We were able to host some of the international missionaries as well and I hosted a super cute girl that was from England. It was super funny because she wanted to get a drink of water before she went to class so I took her to a vending machine. A water bottle was $1.20. She pulls out her money and some coins and then looks at me and says in her English accent "This might seem really dumb, but I have no idea how much these coins are worth." Haha it was funny because I had never even thought about little things like that. I just can't wait to be in Japan and be the one asking silly questions. Our Sister Training Leader assignment ends tomorrow! I'm a little sad, but also grateful that I'm going to again have some time at night to actually write in my journal and things like that. It's been a but of a struggle these past three weeks. Also I'll probably have to start packing my suitcases this week! It's still so surreal that we're actually going to be leaving to Japan. Sometimes we get little glimpses to the outside world. Like this week one girl in my district got a package from her friend and it had hostess donuts in it! Haha we were all just so shocked that hostess is back in business and making food again! Little things like that remind us of how much of a bubble we really do live in here. This past week we all got an email from the mission home saying that they're making our Japanese name tags this week and that we needed to send to them how we wanted our names to be. I made mine ウエルズ姉妹 which will be pronounced "oo-e-ru-zoo shimai" If you say it the first part really fast it almost sounds like Wells haha. It was as close as I could get. Translating English to Japanese is always a struggle because they just don't have the same sounds that we do. All L's turn into R's and V's turn into B's and everything just starts to sound funny. Anyway, just holding out for 9 more days until we fly to Nihon! Thanks once again everyone for all the love and support! Sayonara!