It's a blog about nothing!

Japan!
10/2/2011 - 03:54:55 - 1 comments - By D47
So,

My trip to Japan has ended and I'm sitting back at home with only the memories.
I know I said that I was going to post updates while I was in Japan as a kind of travel journal, but I didn't.

Japan is an amazing place. Things are so similar yet so different in ways that can't really be put accurately into words.

What I did do is take allot of pictures. I will make efforts to create an image gallery type thing when I have time/feel like it.

Aside from the culture of Japan, the temperature there was around 10 degrees (c) in Tokyo and as low as -5 (c) or so in Sapporo. After the first week I came to consider it to be somewhat preferable to the relative heat that I'm used to. Perhaps that's just a side effect of my ridiculously warm jacket.

The people there are certainly very polite but they don't really seem to say anything that isn't ritualised in some way. Naturally the only people we had the chance to talk to where people behind a counter which is a shame. I was looking forward to trying out my Japanese and learning more as I went.

The only time that I got to interact with anyone more naturally was when a small school kid noticed me while I was trying to ice skate and proceeded to try-out the few lines of English he must have learnt at school. "Hello", he said. I responded with "Hi", which in Japanese sounds like their word for yes. After recovering from his confusion he told me his name and asked me how I was, all in English. The whole conversation had an air of condescension and mockery directed at me and my being a foreigner (even if it doesn't sound like it from my description), but of course I can dismiss this as a kid just having fun and in fact I enjoyed it.

While I was over there I had (and still have) rather long blond hair past my shoulders. This certainly attracted allot of looks and made me stand out a bit too.

The experience was definitely a very memorable one and I look forward to visiting again and many more times.
 
D47 (15/3/2011 - 11:50:12)
Glad I went when I did!
Now that its all flooded and destroyed.
 
 
Post Comment:
Name:
Message:
Captcha: captcha
 
 

By Dylan McGannon. Feel free to copy, use and modify anything you find here.

The full source code for this website is available for free at http://sourceforge.net/projects/nullam/.

Valid HTML 4.01 Strict / Valid CSS!