Living Abroad

Hi everyone, it's been a long time hasn't it! Or in Japanese "isashiburi da ne." Sorry, I'm not very good at keeping everything up to date, but I've been having a lot of adventures in the last few weeks and I will attempt to blog about the more interesting ones. I hope everyone is doing well; and Lauren if you get to read this, I hope you're having fun in France.
About a month ago I had the opportunity to experience a home stay in Kanoya-shi, just a short ferry ride away from where I live in Kagoshima-shi. We started out Saturday with a lesson in cooking Japanese food. I pretty much did what I was told and discovered that Japanese people keep their kitchen knives VERY sharp. After that we had a mini-masturi and the host families dressed all the foreigners in crazy looking coats and headbands normally worn by taiko drum players. Sadly I don't have an embarrasing picture of myself to share but here's a link to give you the idea.
http://www.japanesekimono.com/happi.htm
We danced around the room and played a traditional Kagoshima game in which two people have a certain number of sticks they hide behind their hand and then both guess the total number of hidden sticks. Normally the loser then drinks a shot of sake or in kagoshima, shochu, which makes him even less likely to guess correctly the next time. Since we were playing with children the punishment was a shot of green tea. One really cute kid kept winning but wanted to drink the punishment so we ran out of tea quickly.
After the party I went home with my host mother and her two kids, a twelve year old girl and a eight year old boy. We made sushi for dinner and I had my first taste of natto, a food made from fermented soybeans that looks like snot and smells like gym socks, delightful. It so bad really, it had a kind of nutty,spicy, salty flavor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Natto_on_rice.jpg
K, my host family's little boy and I read each other bed time stories. Mine in english and his in Japanese.
The next day I went to a museum wih K. He was so cute!! We tried out all kinds of cool virtual reality games and then figured out how to cheat and the high score on all the virtual reality games. After that we all went to the famous Rose gardens. Here's a picture of us at the gates.

The roses were mostly dead since we went in August, but it was the best giant playground I've ever seen. A huge slide, a couple of riplines and you could even ride around on go carts. There was also a tower we could look out of to see all the famous mountains around the city.
After the rose gardens my host mom drove us out to my first onsen, a Japanese hot spring, for feet only. It was a gorgeous view with Sakurajima right behind us and the onsen was right on the beach. It was just a built up stone bench with water heated by the volcano flowing where you could stick your feet it.

My host family drove me back to the ferry after that and waved at me from the port. If I had the option of living with them instead of living by myself in the city, I would. There are some parts of Japanese culture that just can't be understood unless your part of a Japanese family.

Ohayo gozaimasu (good morning),

On Sunday night I went with Jenny, Kara, and Andrew on Kagoshima's summer nights cruise; a ferry ride around the volcano with a fireworks show at the end. We met at Amu plaza, the center of Kagoshima, which houses restaraunts, shops, and an olypmpic size swimming pool on the FIFTH floor. Yeah, that one has to be seen to be believed. In the plaza they were holding a 24 hour charity tv thing for unicef.

We made our way to the port and even though we arrived half an hour early the boat was nearly full. That's Japan for you, everyone is always early, lateness is a very very bad thing here. My procrastination genes make that the hardest part of of living in Japan for me. That and the lack of peanut butter. The bottom floor of the boat was all tatami, and people took off their shoes to get on, I thought I'd seen it all with tatami in dressing rooms, but now I know they do tatami on boats too, who would've thought?
Anyway there was a very cool taiko performance on board, and then a raffle, and some kind of gameshow that I really couldn't understand, I wish my Japanese would imrove more quickly. Jenny and I made friends with a Japanese boy named Shouta. He was so cute, only about 2 years old, I gave him a frog shaped toothbrush cover (don't ask) and he loved us for the rest of the night. Such a good way to make friends with Japanese people, I should carry small toys with me always. Shouta's drunk grandfather was pretty fun to talk to too. If you think Japanese is hard to understand try slurred Japanese.
Last came the fireworks. They do fireworks right in this country! Sometimes in in America you can see fireworks that change colors all at once, but here they change color gradually from one side of the explosion to the other, very cool to watch. At the fireworks festival I went to last weekend, they had fireworks that continued exploding upward in a line, I'd never seen anything like it. This is very hard to describe so I will try to put up pics and a video, if I can figure out how, later.
Then it was time to go home and get ready for our first week of working with actual students. Ganbaremasu! (I will do my best!)
Summer nights, had me a blast. (yes I know cheesey)

Love,
Ashley

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