Who's the two dudes? One is our son Zach and the other is our other son Nodoka. You didn't know we had two sons? We didn't either until two weeks ago, when we decided to "adopt" a foreign exchange student for the year. Nodaka is from Ogawa Town, Saitama, Japan, which is about an hour by train to the north of Tokyo. He's a junior in high school and is attending the same Lutheran high school that Zach attends.
Nodoka is rapidly adjusting to his new home and culture. We're corrupting him with American food - there's not that much rice in the Diekmann diet, but we do eat a fair amount of fish. He wasn't too impressed though with the oatmeal I made him for breakfast yesterday. We are cosmopolitan enough to have chopsticks in the house. I offered them to Nodoka but he declined.
He likes music, and brought his electric guitar with him, but fortunately not the amp. Actually, he plays it very well. He also plays varying degrees of trombone, trumpet, saxophone, keyboard, flute, drums, and who knows what else. With Zach on his tenor sax and Nodoka on bass guitar, we've got the beginnings of a pretty solid jazz band. He says he wants to be on the baseball team at school too. He hasn't played in a couple of years, and says he can throw hard but doesn't have any control.
Like most of the Japanese people, Nodoka says he isn't Christian or any other religion, but he's happy to go to church with us. He does a great job singing the hymns - he can sight read the music and does a pretty good job with pronunciation. And since God's Word is powerful, I'm hopeful that the Word will work on his heart and we'll be sending a missionary back to Japan in June. We're excited to have Nodoka. Stop by and say "hi."
Last Friday we went to a Mariners game in Seattle. Here's a few of the pics.
We sat about a dozen rows up by the right field foul pole. I chose those seats because that's Area 51. (For you non-Mariners, Ichiro's number is #51, and since he plays right field, they call it Area 51. As Nodoka says "Ichiro is Japanese hero.")
After having a look at this, I'm not that enthused about eating cod.
Nodoka at the gum wall thinking "I'd look really good on that bike." (More on the gum wall next week.)
Two young men looking to the future.
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