Monday, January 6th, 2014'

Dear Family, 

Happy happy New Years!!!!  あけましておめでとうございます！！！

This past week was a lot of fun, but we had a lot of crazy things come to us. 

The new missionaries came in to town and we had an adventure getting them.  Do you guys know who Ariana Grande is??  Well, she is pretty famous in Japan I guess. Anyway, she came in to Tokyo the same time as the new missionaries and so while we were at the airport picking them up, there was a giant fan club of teenage girls there.  In the midst of all the confusion and ciaos of her coming out of the airport, I was able to meet with her mom and her sister and her brother and talked with them for like 5 minutes.  They were way nice, proud of her daughter, excited to visit Tokyo.  They knew about the church pretty well and I invited them to learn more about it when they go back.  They had a lot of questions about what it's like to live in Japan and we had a fun time talking about that and watching the fans go crazy around Ariana.  

We got ourselves a nice group of new missionaries here.  They are way prepared, way young, but ready to go out and work.  We spent all day Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday training them and showing them the ropes.  On New Years Day, we took all the new missionaries out on the streets and dendoed for a few hours.  It was a big shock for most of them, especially since it was crazy busy and everyone was drunk.  We had some good conversations though and handed out some BOM's.  

Then on Friday we did a big deep clean of the whole Honbu for a few hours and made the whole place sparkly clean and what not.  Then we have spent the past few days visiting all the members in the ward and dropping off a nice little new years card of all the missionaries in this ward.  There are twelve of them here, so in order for then to remember all of us we made a little picture and post card.  So I have walked like 20 miles in the past two days, haha.  Buts it's been a good way to contact people and do lots of finding as we go.  We need to do some big time finding around here cause we have little by little dropped all of our investigators over the past few weeks.  People just aren't keeping commitments and aren't progressing.  So we are back to square one, back to finding, but it's all good cause we have a lot of finding opportunities this month.  It's a lot less busy than last month.  

I hope all is going well over there!  I love you guys and pray for you every day!

Love, 

Elder Crandall