Hello from Japan! Four years ago we sat in our living room in Duluth watching the Lillehammer Olympics with the snow coming down outside, and Peggy said that next time, we were going. So we started the Nagano Fund, a coffee can on top of the refrigerator, and every spare dollar for four years went into it. Our daughter Carrie is home minding the house and the dog, and here we are.

We're writing these notes on one of the two computers in our hotel's little business center, off the lobby. The keyboards are Japanese. The letters are mostly where ours are, but there are extra keys we're afraid to push. The room charges by the half hour, so we write everything out longhand at night and type fast in the morning.

We drove down to Minneapolis Thursday morning, flew out after lunch, and landed at the airport outside Tokyo on Friday afternoon. We lost Thursday night somewhere over the Pacific Ocean and haven't found it yet. Then a train into Tokyo and the new bullet train up to Nagano. The line just opened last fall, in time for the Games, and it gets you here in about an hour and a half. It was so smooth that Peggy's coffee didn't even ripple. We got to the hotel after ten at night, and Alan hit his head on the bathroom door frame before he even got his coat off. That's going to be a theme.

Ceremony tickets were way out of our price range, so we did the next best thing. Early in the morning we walked up the main street to Zenko-ji, the big old temple at the top of town, along with what felt like half of Japan. At eleven o'clock they rang the temple's huge old bell to start the Olympics, and that whole crowd went quiet. Peggy squeezed Alan's hand so hard he still has the marks. (Back home it was eight o'clock Friday night. We keep doing that arithmetic.)

Then we hurried back down to the hotel and watched the rest on the big TV in the lobby, with about forty people from all over the world. Sumo wrestlers came out to purify the ground, and then the grand champion Akebono, who grew up in Hawaii. A conductor named Seiji Ozawa led an orchestra in Beethoven's Ninth, with choirs in other countries singing along at the same moment by satellite. Peggy knows that tune from church and sang right along in English while everybody else sang in whatever they had. And then the figure skater Midori Ito lit the flame. The whole lobby clapped, and a lady from Australia gave Peggy a hug.

No tickets today, so we walked all over Nagano. A few things we have learned:

• The vending machines. They're on every corner, even out on little side streets in the snow, and the same machine sells drinks hot AND cold. You can get a hot can of coffee for a little over a hundred yen, which is about a dollar. Alan has had six today. We are not telling his doctor.
• Bowing. Everybody bows. The hotel clerks bow, the shopkeepers bow when you come in and again when you leave, and the conductor bowed to the whole train car. Peggy has started bowing back at everybody, including, once, a vending machine that talked to her.
• Being tall. Alan is six foot four. In a crowd here he can see over everybody, so he's become our meeting place: "Meet by Alan." Little kids stare, and then wave. He has hit his head on four doorways and a sign.
• The food. Nagano is famous for its buckwheat noodles, and we had a big hot bowl for lunch in a tiny place with eight stools. Lots of restaurants have plastic models of every dish in the front window, so you can just point, which is how we've eaten most of our meals. The rice balls from the corner store come in a wrapper you're supposed to pull apart in a certain order so the seaweed stays crisp. We have not done it right yet. We'll keep practicing.

The men's downhill was supposed to be today, up in the mountains, and it got put off because of the weather. It's been put off again since. Snow, then wind, then fog. Those poor skiers.

This is the very first time women's hockey has been in the Olympics, and we were in the Aqua Wing Arena for the U.S. against Sweden in the four o'clock game. USA 7, Sweden 1!

Peggy grew up with four brothers on the rink her dad flooded in the backyard every December, and not once did anybody let her play in a real game. She yelled herself hoarse today. She still can't talk above a whisper, which Alan says is the first quiet morning he's had since 1974. There were Japanese schoolgirls in the row behind us waving little American flags and little Swedish flags at the same time, cheering for everybody, and by the third period we were cheering for everybody too.

For two people who've curled every winter at our club in Duluth for twelve years, this was THE day. Curling is a real Olympic medal sport for the first time ever. We rode the bullet train back down the line to Karuizawa, a little resort town in the mountains, and spent the whole day at the curling arena.

Four games going at once on four sheets. Ice so beautiful Alan wanted to lie down on it. The Japanese fans around us were learning the game as they went, and a gentleman next to us asked Alan, in very good English, why everyone was shouting at the stones. Alan explained sweeping with his hands for about twenty minutes. By the end of the afternoon that man was shouting too.

Alan wrote down every end of every game in his program. We'll put the scores up when we get home.

Up at five for the bus up into the mountains to Hakuba. Nothing on TV gets the size of a ski jump across. It looks like it goes straight up into the clouds, and those young men go down it on purpose. We stood at the bottom in the snow with thousands and thousands of Japanese fans, and nearly all of them were there for Kazuyoshi Funaki. Every time a jumper came off the end, the whole crowd let out one long breath together, and then held it until he landed.

This was the normal hill. A jumper from Finland named Jani Soininen won the gold, Funaki got the silver by ONE point, and Andreas Widhölzl from Austria got the bronze. You would have thought Funaki won the whole Olympics by the noise. On the bus back down, the man in the seat across the aisle showed us with his hands how far Funaki flew. Three times.

It's Thursday morning now, 7:40, and the lady who runs the business center is giving us a look. Today we're taking it easy and walking around town. The NHL players start tomorrow. It's the first time ever they've let the NHL fellows play in the Olympics, and the U.S. men play Sweden Friday afternoon. We'll be watching it on TV in the hotel lounge with half of Minnesota.

Lots more to come! We've got tickets to see the NHL fellows play next week, we're going back to Karuizawa on Sunday the 15th for the curling medal games, and Peggy has her heart set on finding a way into the figure skating. We fly home Saturday the 21st. We'll keep writing every morning that the business center lady lets us.

Pictures when we get home! Eleven rolls of film so far, and it's only Day 5. The drugstore on London Road is going to be very busy the week we get back.

Send us a note at [email protected] and we'll put it up here.