Hello hello hello.

Hello hello hello. Louise here.

Erica has pretty much summed up my first impression of Japan: hot! Coming from the New Zealand winter, (where we've had temperatures down to -4° C) it was a bit of a change, but training in the heat makes me appreciate how cool it is when I'm not training.

I would like to make a disclaimer here: I'm not actually super at Japanese. I can read hiragana and katakana (two of the three Japanese alphabets) and if I'm lucky I understand about 30% of what people say, though often not even that. Luckily Erica can read kanji (characters derived from Chinese) as she knows Mandarin and Cantonese, so together we can usually figure out written Japanese. Now that's what I call teamwork!