JAPAN!

So for those who don’t follow me on Twitter, I have spent this last week in Japan visiting one of the collaborators on my VADR project with two colleagues from the UK. So far my week has been a fun adventure in food and looking puzzled.

Where I am in Japan is not exactly a common tourist destination – it’s very rare to find a Japanese person who will speak English, so I am entirely reliant on my Japanese-speaking colleagues. This arrangement has two down-sides. Firstly, being the only non-Japanese speaking person in the group does mean I’ve spent a large percentage of my time looking awkwardly at my shoes while everyone laughs at what sounds like an amazing Japanese joke. Secondly, my colleagues get used like walking translator/tourist guide apps and have to endure me constantly looking at them quizzically or saying  “ooo, what’s that?!” every 30 seconds wherever we walk around.

I will be coming back to Japan next year and if there is one thing I’ve learnt it’s that I really need learn some basic Japanese if I want to be able to eat without translators. Especially because my actual Japanese translator app is… a bit crap.

Even with my struggles with linguistics I am absolutely loving Japan. I’ve eaten way too much food and see some amazing sights. But this is not a travel blog so I’m not going to bore you too much with re-telling all the exciting things from my working holiday. This week you’ll have to make do with a short update and if you are particularly interested, then some holiday snaps are in an album below.

I would have written a much longer, snappier blog post but it turns out Jet Lag and a lot of drinking have not been very conducive to creative writing.