Getting in touch with everyone

Konnichiwa Minna-san (Hello everyone),

I've been in Japan almost an entire month and I've come to a conclusion. Its impossible to keep everyone up to date through emails. If I even had the time and patience to write one email with all the detail I want to put into it, its still only one email and I don't have the time to write everyone individually, so even though I thought it would never happen I'm starting a blog. I'll try to make sure eveyone has a link to this page but if you know someone who wants to read this and doesn't have a link please feel free to share. Please bear with me while I figure out how all this blogging stuff works too.
For those who don't yet know I've been placed in Kagoshima City in Kagoshima, Japan. I'm at about the same latitude as Miami, FL and Naples Italy so its pretty hot here, we have palm trees and the only area of Japan thats more southerly is Okinawa. I live less than 4km from one of the most active volcanoes in the world. We have ash pick-up days in our garbage schedule and people carry around ash umbrellas. Since I've been here I've seen the volcano smoking, but I haven't actually gotten ash on myself even without an umbrella, but my JTE (Japanese teachers of english) tell me there was a pretty big eruption just before I got here. The scenerey is beautiful. The city is situated in a valley of the Kirishima mountains and I'm 3 km from the bay (the volcano, Sakurajima, is in the middle of the bay). The school I'll be teaching at, Higashi is in the mountains and much closer to the volcano.

The people here are very warm and friendly, I live in a city with twice the poulation of Tulsa squeezed into an area a tenth the size of Tulsa.

Kagoshima's most famous son is Saigo Takamori, the last samurai (he's the guy Ken Watanabe's character was based on in the Last Samurai movie) there are statues of the guy all over the place here. You can go visit the house he was born in, the cave he commited suicide in after his Satsuma Rebellion failed, and there are tourist attracions based on his everyother life event. If you've studied any modern Japanese history (or just like to watch the history channel a lot), this is the area where Christianity, guns and foreigners were first introduced to Japan.
Well that was probably way more educational than it should have been, next time I promise to have better stories and not give anymore history lessons. I hope everyone back in the States is doing well!

Jya mata (until next time),
Ashley