Hi all!! We went to a Hiroshima Carps baseball game on Wednesday and it was a total blast!! The Carps are actually not too good but they won against the 2nd ranked team in Japan when we were there (woo hoo)! A Japanese baseball game was quite the experience. Every person there is decked out in Carps gear and they have about 30 different chears including a different cheer for each player up to bat. There are a bunch of guys who lead the cheers and they have to switch off about every inning because they scream the entire time. There were also guys waving huge flags right behind us and then they would also play trumpets. Phil and I are going to try to go to the Sandankyo Gorge tomorrow and swim. My base school started up on Thursday (yesterday) and I had two speeches. One speech was to the teachers and my JTE translated, the other was to the entire school at the opening ceremony. All morning the students had been saying "good morning" to me in their best English, so I went up there and said "Good Morning!!" expecting a huge response and heard nothing but complete silence. Luckily it was a very short speech and I was able to get out of there relatively quickly. The teachers have all been very nice and the students are all very eager to talk to me but also extremely shy to. For instance I will have a group of about four kids all come up to me and then spend about two minutes urging eachother to ask me something. Then one will say "what's your name?" and they will talk it over with eachother for another two minutes before answering perfectly "my name is lksjdfaisdjflj" and really that's about what I hear. I have everyone write their names out for me. Phil has been getting out there applying for jobs which I'm sure is a bit intimidating in another country. He's also been finding really neat places to run. We are pretty much surrounded by beautiful hills and he says that all of them are filled with different trails. He's also found a good little running store where the owner is extremely nice and tells him about all the upcoming races. My days usually are over around three so we've been able to spend a lot of time together in the evenings and explore together (not trails...I leave that to him). Okay I'll post some more pictures from the came (Go Carps!!!!!)