Home from Hokkaido

It's been three days since I got home from my adventure and I think I'm fully recovered now. I went to Hakodate in Hokkaido (the northern Japanese island) with two of my students early Friday morning and we got back Saturday night. It's rather embarrassing how exhausted I became considering their ages...69 and 75. I blame it on a combination of lack of sleep leading up to getting up before 6am two days in a row, and living my entire life in Japanese for two days and a night.
We took the early train from Takanosu up to Aomori (a harbor town on the top of the main island, Honshu) and from Aomori took the train up to Hakodate...which is quite a trick considering it's a seperate island. Japanese and their engineering feats...the train went under the ground at the bottom of the ocean, so as of Friday, I've been under the ocean in a train. (But they should get rid of all the mountains before that tunnel because everybody in the train thought we were under the ocean like 3 times; by the time we were in the right tunnel under the ocean it was quite anticlimatical.)
We got to Hakodate and went straight to Onuma (a lake with a bunch of little islands in it created by the volcano spewing things into the river and blocking it off 300 years ago...so beautiful), Goryokaku (a 'Western Style' fortress/castle in the shape of a star from a couple hundred years ago...it's really only the moat and the park left, but we took the elevator up like a small CN Tower and could look at the star shaped castle grounds and the whole city), the Trapestine Convent (I never thought I would ever go to a nunnery in Japan...), stopped at the airport to go to the bathroom, went up Hakodate Mountain to watch the sunset and the city lights when it got dark (this night view is the third best in the world according to our taxi driver, next to Hong Kong and Naples, Italy...I personally thought the sunset was much better than city lights...). Then we rushed back to our hotel (which was on the ocean) for our buffet reservation. They dressed me in a yukata and we went and feasted on many things Japanese. (I think it's funny how they call a buffet a 'viking' in Japanese...all you Scandinavians can share my joy at that one...) I then had a bath and went to bed on my futon on the tatami floor.
Then next morning I woke up and had a bath again, had another feast, and left in the pouring rain for the day. We went to a famous brick shopping place on the harbor that used to be old warehouses, and then we went to board the ferry. By this time the weather had turned absolutely gorgeous for the four hour ride across the ocean from one island to another.
The whole weekend was supposed to be rainy; on the Tuesday before we left they were telling me about these dolls you hang outside to bring good weather - I told them I didn't need them because I have God and I can just ask him to bring us good weather...so I did. And we had beautiful weather. Then Saturday morning they asked me to pray for good weather again because it wasn't looking so good...so I did. And it turned absolutely beautiful. Maybe this was the biggest witness I could give this weekend, just the fact that I pray for seemingly trivial things like having good weather and God would care about me to answer, that we can pray about anything and it won't be stupid.
So we took the ferry home; they slept and I wandered around the ship, mostly outside, looking at the amazing scenery of mountains and ocean and cloud splattered sky.
I can only hope that anything that they possibly learned about Jesus in those two days will stick and grow in their hearts to a faith that will change the world around them.