The team from Juilliard! Here they are (14 musicians and a dancer) with some new friends after a performance party. They did so many performances, lessons, played for churches...and were just a fabulous bunch. I miss them already!

3 of the musicians are staying a few extra weeks : ) This morning they performed a mini benefit concert at a tower community room, the center of "Tsukuda Loves Tohoku" (disaster relief from this neighborhood to the area hit hardest by 3-11). One of the workers at this tower dropped by, donating a pile of change he had found while cleaning around the building.

I'll be seeing a lot of this great little room as I get involved in "Tsukuda loves Tohoku", and it's also where I go for our neighborhood Gospel Choir rehearsals every Friday : )




Oops!

There has been plenty to learn these first weeks, from Japanese language and culture, to finding my way around, to singing southern Gospel music (in Japanese), to making awesome recipes my allergic-to-everything friends can eat. But I never would have guessed some of the things I have learned this week. There have been a couple times when my mistakes terrified me... but thank you, God, I can look back and laugh! And now, if you have time to read this novella, you can laugh at me, too : )

Like this one time when I was unloading groceries. Lots of big heavy bags of CostCo groceries, going from the basement garage to the 22nd floor. I heard the easiest way is to stand by the elevator, hold the door open, and shove all the bags on- you know, so you don't have to go up and down 30 times. But I learned that when you're almost done loading the elevator, if those last few bags in the hall are just out of your reach and you go to grab them, when you turn around the elevator doors are closed... and you watch your elevator full of groceries go up, up, and away... (not to worry, after pushing the "come baaaaack!" button a zillion times, it came back down several minutes later with 2 extremely confused looking workmen.)

And then there was the time I was "driving" the 3 year old to preschool on the bike...and I learned that when you stop a bike, and your legs are too short to reach the ground, so you have to tip a tiny bit to the side to touch your toe to the ground to balance yourself...that doesn't work so well when the bike has a kid buckled on the back. Gravity however, works beautifully. Time moved in slow motion as I tried to right the bike, and we (bike, kid, and I) tipped completely sideways onto the sidewalk of innocent bystanders trying to walk to work. Not to worry: the passersby lept out of the way in time, miraculously, no one got a scratch, and I'm pretty sure everyone involved got a good laugh out of it once we got our hearts beating at a normal speed. (I wonder how many times this story has been told around Tokyo now...)

Tower, Sweet Tower

As sleepiness hit this afternoon I went for a stroll to stay awake, and took a few snapshots around my new neighborhood!

Things to pray for this week:
-health and energy... gotta love jet-lag.
-the Juilliard team who arrives on Thursday; that God would shine His love and light through all of us during their busy 2 weeks here.
-my first Japanese lesson on Thursday!