Funny happenings in the country of the rising sun

So I’ve been trying to remember all of the funny things that have happened on our little excursion here in Japan so I could share some of them with you. I really am not familiar at all with Japan and was going on this trip purely because I haven’t been here before and I like to experience other cultures. Well, right from the get-go our group of Taiwan English teachers realized that we had picked up some bad habits whilst being in Taiwan. We’ve been whistled down a couple of times by policemen when we’ve crossed the road when there were no cars coming but not when the crosswalk said walk. All of us (even me!) have accidentally said our little “xiexie”s and our “buhaoyisi”s realizing immediately afterwards that we were speaking the wrong foreign language. I think the funniest moment of Taiwan faux-pas was when we were going to take a bus to the Imperial Palace. In Taiwan when a bus stops that is where you load so if it stops a long ways off because there are many buses already stopped you have to race to the place where it is unloading so that you can get on before it takes off again. So when the bus that we needed stopped a little before the bus stop because there was a bus that hadn’t left the loading place yet all of our party started to quickly move in the general direction of the bus which immediately drew stares of bewilderment from the long line of Japanese people waiting patiently at the loading area. That kind of stopped us in our tracks and embarrassingly we realized that the bus would probably be nicer than the buses in Taiwan and actually pick up passengers at the designated bus stop area. Japanese people apparently do things by the rule book.

In the hostel we were staying at there was another very unique experience that I found fascinating. I kind of am a fan of hostels now. They are such an interesting atmosphere of different cultures, ages and travelers that are put in a space without much room and privacy and yet have an immediate camaraderie that you just can’t get anywhere else. We met three girls who were staying there from Taiwan who were thrilled to meet Americans who were teaching in Taiwan. I also met some guys from America there working for their vacation (they were studying in Mainland China) and also a group of vacation workers from Australia. I think the Australian accent is pretty much the most attractive accent out there. I was talking to an Australian while doing laundry and I swear I could have made out with her on the spot! The most interesting guy I met was a dude from Turkey. Who would have thought you would meet a guy in Japan from Turkey? He spoke the language pretty easily it seems and he was a pretty interesting fellow. We talked a lot about how I don’t know much about that part of the world and how that was a shame and he told me about how where he lives there really wasn’t much hostility towards America at all as far as he could tell. I found that heartening, but also depressing that the media paints such a bias and untrue picture of the middle-east.

All in all I have really enjoyed being here in Japan. It has been a very liberating and fascinating trip. The culture here is so much like Taiwan, and yet it also has its own little corner in the world and really is its own entity. I would really like to come back to Kyoto to visit again. There was so much that we didn’t get to see. Maybe someday.