The Sweet Dropper

Tuesday, July 21: Tuesday we cooked our own breakfast in the apartment (omelettes and toast), finished laundry, watched some CNN, rested up a bit and then were taken to nearby Seto City, where we attended a meeting of the Rotary Club of Seto North–a club about the same size as that of Kosciusko, of which I am a member. We ate lunch there (beef curry, one of my favorites, but JNP did not like). I exchanged banners with the president and was asked to address the club for a few minutes. People were very welcoming and I exchanged many business cards. We met a Rotary exchange student from Finland who is about to return home after spending a year in Japan. We discovered that she is a believer, and she was very excited to meet an evangelical pastor. She found more Christian fellowship in Japan than she has back home in Finland. 
 
After the meeting we travelled on our own back into Nagoya and did the tourist thing–a tour of Nagoya Castle. Nagoya Castle, built in 1612, was one of the largest, most sophisticated castles of the Edo period. It was destroyed by an Allied bombing raid in May, 1945, but was reconstructed in 1959 and is now a seven-story museum about ancient Japanese history. We even made it back to the apartment by ourselves by subway, then by bus. Then we met at the church with some of the short-term workers–college students who have been doing what I was doing here 20 years ago. After that we had supper (Mexican casserole and grits, cooked by Linda Wixon) with an English class. Conversational English classes are one of the primary ways the MTW team establishes contact and builds relationships with local residents. The four class members ”interviewed” us as their English work for the night. We ended up talking about Japanese politics and American politics, Nelson’s impressions of Japan, and food. Around 9, Nelson and I walked to the local Starbucks, which was filled with college students cramming for exams (a university is nearby).