Later on I travelled down to the Embassy to welcome the Bureau Chief from the LA Times, doing a story on the Embassy. We have also had Israeli radio, Italian news and Australian TV channels ring in the last 24 hours.

Today we awoke to the sounds of "Bright Eyes" and other best forgotten tunes from the 80s, emanating loudly from the whaling ship next to the museum as they checked out the ships PA system. Can it get more surreal? Anyway we are now getting more and more visitors each day, from dribs and drabs at first to a little trickle today. Given that they are from the local pro-whaling area, each person that we talk to is immensely significant for the opinions of the whole area. At one point a group of 15 local men skulked in, arms folded, looking very hostile. After 20 mintues of explaining why whales should be protected not hunted, they burst out into spontaneous applause and walked out to the words of 'keep fighting!'

As the locals left, the circus act began, this time with the IWC officials arriving to 'humbly' ask us to leave. We proceeded to humbly tell them that we will only leave when plans for the whalemeat factory are abandoned, and when we hear reassurance that the government will not resume lethal, so-called scientific whaling in any form. The officials ducked and dived our repsonses and questions, and after they had drunk the coffee which we had given them out of plastic children's "Tweety" mugs, they said 'couldn't you move just a little bit?' as we were blocking the construction of the cetacean research centre. We replied that we would love to move, and in fact we would love not to not be here at all, but given that our concerns with regards to the fate of whales and dolphins in Korean waters had not been met, that we would remain. It ended with this statement by the official: "Well we will begin building anyway, and I must warn you now, things will be very unpleasant for you - very dusty and noisy' so it looks like the next cxhapter has begun; 8 days in and the ante had been upped, we've had our first warning, and for the first time, the officials know that we mean business. By far the funniest bit of the meeting was when the official warned us that the reputation of our organsiation would be damaged by our camping 'illegally' on this site...!

Anyway, that's all for now, things are looking great here, and the Embasy is beginning to fly. Thanks so much everyone for your support and for all the emails, they have really helped kickstart the Embassy by opening up dialogue with big hitters in government.

More Soon,

Best,

Jim