Highlights since my last entry

I am writing to you overflowing with joy. I was just at Kansai Christian School (KCS) this morning for the start of the 2015-2016 school year. There were introductions of new staff, students, a time of worship, a brief message by the school Chaplin as well as announcements regarding fall after school activities. What an experience to be in the midst of parents, teachers and students representing six different nationalities all joined together in unison worshiping the Lord. It was amazing! We are so incredibly blessed to be a part of what God is doing here at KCS.

So many new experiences and adventures it is hard to select only a few. I would like to tell you everything but I know it would be boring compared to living it so I will just give you the highlights.

We were blessed a week ago to have dinner at the Magner’s. They invited new KCS staff and their families for taco rice. It was a wonderful chance to interact with families in our community and socialize with other new teachers. Since then, the Magner's got us in touch with a mechanic friend and found us a car!

The Chadduck' New (Used) Car!

The car thing here is really hard to understand. Basically this family is giving us the car for free and we need to pay the shaken (maintenance so it will pass inspection). This shaken is no small deal though and it can be fairly costly if the car is old but ours is a 2003 with only 75K on it! The shaken comes due every two years and must be completed in order to license a car. Seems like a great deal to me. This car would sell for way more in the states. Apparently the general rule is most people would rather purchase a newer car than pay the shaken to maintain an aging car that is still running with low miles.

This is a HUGE answer to prayer and we hope to have the car in a couple of weeks. Also, get this, we had to obtain a form from the police station verifying we have parking space. Apparently the police will come to our house next week and measure our parking space to confirm our car fits in our carport. I guess that is why houses and streets are neat and tidy around here.

We made a few large purchases for the house this week from the Recycle store (thrift store with all kinds of housing items). One being an electric washing machine and I for one am really grateful! I had to do laundry by hand this week. No, I am serious, and as I type this I cannot believe I did it! It took over two hours and then I had to hang it out on our balcony to dry. We are having unseasonably rainy weather which makes drying clothes outside virtually impossible. It took two days for the clothes to not feel damp to the touch. I am so thrilled to have this washing machine! The limiting factor now is I may only wash as many loads as I have space to hang up on the balcony. Oh well, definatley first world problems right!?

All the controls are in Japanese but I am figuring it out.

The other item I am thrilled to have is our kitchen hutch. We were desperate for additional counter and storage space. Now we are able to move the microwave (given to us by another teacher for FREE) and our toaster oven off the gas stove. We had them stacked one on top of the other and had to relocate them each time we needed to use the stove. Amazing how you take things for granted until you do not have them. 

Kitchen hutch with additional counter space.

We had one last bit of summer fun last Friday and went to the Osaka aquarium with two former home-stay students.The aquarium is one of the worlds’ largest and it took about four hours to walk through. They have a whale shark on display that is about 20 feet long as well as a really interesting jelly fish exhibit. We enjoyed taking the hour train ride to Osaka as well. There is a really long tunnel we travel through to get from Heguri to Osaka through the mountain.

The population of Osaka is roughly 8,894,000 and I was so impressed by the cleanliness and organization of the city for its size. I knew we were in a huge city because of all the concrete, trains and roads but it was so orderly and quite for being so enormous. Really exciting to actually be in Osaka after looking at it for months on Google maps. So cool! I still cannot believe we are ACTUALLY here!

Osaka Aquarium

Amazing Jelly Fish Exhibit

So as I mentioned earlier, school started today, Wednesday, 9/2/2015 at 8:15 a.m. The kids packed up their backpacks last night with new supplies, put on new clothes this morning and we walked to school. They were pretty good sports about my traditional first day of school picture in front of our house. Truth is I think we were all pretty excited to start the school year.

First day of school 2015 - 20216 Kansai Christian School

I could go on but I will save the rest for next week. May God bless you and keep you. We think of family and friends often and send our love you.

The Chadducks