Enjoying Hakodate

I need to find a better routine or cycle of posting. When there's big events I'm too busy to post, and when there's not big events nothing feels quite worth writing about on its own.

We've been having a lot of fun just with our routine events. We've been having nearly-weekly dinners with our friends David and Frida; sometimes they'll introduce us to a new place, sometimes we'll introduce them to a new place, and sometimes we'll go to an old place that we all liked. Last week we went back to the Chinese restaurant that they introduced us to, with the big dishes of spicy peppers, but this time we found a sweet egg-and-mushroom dish that Cassie enjoyed too!

We've also (re)started weekly English lessons with our friends Miyuki and Tomoko, which is just so much fun. Every week they give me a simple topic they've been struggling with - one week it was, "How do I tell when to use 'to' and when to use 'for?'" and this week it'll be, "How can I tell when a verb is transitive or intransitive?" - and I'll make a simple helper sheet for them, we'll talk about it for the first chunk of class, and then that always launches us into pleasant conversation for the rest of class. They're both at that really fun level of language learning where they benefit from understanding the rules underlying the structure almost as much as they benefit from just engaging in real conversation, which are the two most fun parts! I really enjoy the mechanics of language, so it's always fun when I'm telling a story and I'm like, "Oh, wait, do you understand what I mean when I say 'ignorant?' Let me explain. It's kind of like..."

These are the same friends who occasionally take us farming with them; we went last Tuesday, and it's fun hanging out with Taku-san, whose farm it is, because his English is excellent, and so I can ask him lots of questions that I can't ask most anyone else here - he knows enough English to understand my questions, and knows enough about Japanese to know the answers to them!

Cassie and I have been going to the morning, Japanese-only services at church lately - in addition to the bilingual afternoon services, not instead. It's good practice, spending the morning parsing what we can, and then getting quick feedback in the afternoon as to how much of what we heard was correct. (Usually we do okay, but last week we definitely, definitely did not, haha.) But it's also fun talking to the Japanese-only congregation; it's hard to say we're making friends yet, since we can only have very casual, surface-level conversations, but it's already gotten to the point that like, when Cassie was sick the other week and didn't come, lots of people came up to me to ask about her and then pray for her.

I've still been enjoying bike rides and the occasional hike/long walk. I went for a night bike ride recently, which was fun, if a little... well, let's just say I shouldn't have tried to go to new places after dark, instead of revisiting places I've already been to in the day. I wound up in a part of town I've never been in, sharing some cramped tunnels with cars, getting a little lost. Only the fun kind of lost, not the scary kind of lost, but even the fun kind is a little scary in the dark.

There've been a few other one-off events, probably enough now that I can just gloss over all of them in a big compilation post like this one. Oh, man, I still need to organize them a bit, but maybe tomorrow I'll post some pictures from when Cassie and I went to a nearby cape at sunset. (Spoiler alert: it was gorgeous.)

For now though, the moral of the story is we're having a great time. We're so glad God brought us back here!