A day in the life of a missionary on home assignment #1

After spending most of yesterday yawning, today David and I gathered the energy to do some "work" today. We dove into the miriad of email communications we've received from our mission headquarters here in Australia about our National Conference in Sydney this weekend. 

We're now closer to being prepared for all that's required of us on Friday afternoon (several informal sharing times) and Saturday (a 3 minute sharing time in front of a group as big as 300 people, twice leading a 40 minute workshop about support ministries, and a fun culture evening where we're helping people make origami). Thankfully nothing on Sunday that we know of, except people wanting to talk to us whenever and wherever.

Then late-morning I caught a train for the city, to meet with one of my new Japanese friends (I wrote about them here) for lunch. We had a lovely time, chatting for a couple of hours, in both Japanese and English. The idea for us meeting is "Language Exchange". It is a rare thing for me to find someone to chat to in Japanese here in Australia, so this is a golden opportunity. 

Language Exchange is always a challenge however, because one or the other language can take over the whole conversation. Or you can get lazy because both languages are known in part by both people, you can end up mashing the languages together. I think we did okay today, but I did miss my Tokyo language exchange partners. 

Meeting in the city was interesting too, I haven't been in there very often in the last decade. I found it strange to walk past a Japanese fast food burger chain (Mos Burger) and find people all around me eating "sushi rolls". I guess in that environment, it wasn't so strange to sit at a cafe talking in a mixture of English and Japanese. 

On the way back to the train station I walked into a purportedly "Asian" grocery store, but found almost nothing Japanese. I think it was mostly Korean food, so I walked out again.

The rest of the day was spent riding home on the train, buying a couple of extra things from the grocery store at our home station, fending off a charity looking for donations and all my personal details, and getting dinner on the table.

Such is the day of a missionary on home assignment, in case you were wondering what we do between "ministry".

Now I'd better go and iron my summer kimono and work on my origami skills in preparation for the weekend...