This year winter came very suddenly in Japan. Or maybe I spent too much time during autumn travelling to warmer locations.
Nevertheless, Tsukuba is freezing right now. The temperature for today was 2-12 degrees, and the forecast for the rest of the week is no temperatures above 10 degrees. Brrrrr. I usually like the cold, but I can’t deny that it gets hard to do anything productive at home trembling like this. Also, cold brings with it terrible eating habits :-)
In other news, my cellphone has started receiving loads and loads of spam. One of my contacts probably got their contact list spilled somewhere :-( I’m getting up to 15 spam messages a day, which is quite annoying. Does anyone knows of a good anti-spam app for android?
Finally, I upgraded wordpress. This time around, the upgrade was completely painless. Just click a single link. Color me impressed!
I’ve been wanting to travel to Japan for many years now. How long have you been there? Do you read/write/speak Japanese well? I took a class in college but was quickly overwhelmed, and I feel like things would be MUCH easier if I knew more about the language before traveling.
Let’s say I only have one week to visit Japan. Where would someone like me even start as far as researching and planning for the trip?
AND YES… cold weather ruins my eating habits. I just started a juice fast yesterday as a way to just cut it off entirely and start over.
Hey Sonny!
Hmmmm, I’ve been living in Japan for about 8 years now (10 years since I came here for the first time). I can speak day-to-day japanese reasonably well, but proper formal speech still gives me trouble from time to time. I can read and write e-mails and short documents… writing cursive japanese is kind of a pain in the ass – and since I almost never actually have to write japanese by hand, my skill in that has deteriored quite a lot.
As for travelling to Japan, if you only plan to spend a week here as a tourist, you don’t really need to worry about knowing Japanese. All tourist destinations have very good english support, and even non-tourist destination should be navigable in english, unless you are going to somewhere really obscure. Most japanese can’t really hold a conversation in english, but that won’t keep them from trying in other creative ways.
As for what to do here in one week, it really depends on what interests you in Japan. I would recommend either using this week to dive deep down into Tokyo, or to try and get “a little bit of everything”, by doing the Tokyo-Kyoto-Hiroshima” circuit, but there are many other options.
You can feel free to mail me about this :-D
AWESOME! I know of a few places I’d like to visit and I’m sure I could consult some kind of tour guide or something but I always prefer to ‘know’ someone in the area before I take off into unknown territory. When I decide to make the trip, I’ll email you to get some more tips/advice.
And if you ever decide to come to the south here in America… just let me know. I’ll teach you how to act in public so you don’t get dragged behind a truck down a dirt road.