Settling in to our new home

We are now getting settled in our new home in the town of Karuizawa, in the mountains of Nagano prefecture. This region is where the winter Olympics were held in 1998. Actually our little town was the proud host of the Olympic Curling events. ☺ We are literally living in “a little cabin in the woods”. It is beautiful (and cold) and will be our home for the next two years as we study Japanese at Karuizawa Language School. When we first arrived, the cabin was just completed, but was without major appliances – including heat! So we stayed with some fellow MTW missionary friends next door for the first two nights. (It is cool that we overlap with two families from our MTW team for several months here in Karuizawa. They’ll all be heading back to the Tokyo/Chiba area this summer, but at least we’ll get to “learn the ropes” from them these first few months.) Each day we’ve been here we’ve made good progress in getting settled, and we now have heat (!) as well as basic furniture and household items we need to function. We’re still waiting on our shipment of boxes from the States, which should arrive within the next 3 weeks.