The smartphone saves my backside, repeatedly

[tugrik]

Just to be honest about things: planning this trip the way I did was absolutely crazy. It was just due to a 10pm getting-crazy-cheap tickets ($350rt) to Tokyo after seeing them on a realtime twitter travel feed and a quick text approval from my boss for the time off. Then added in a Lonely Planet article on "Hokkaido Road Tripping", and boom,

Comments

[sabotlours]

I salute you for being so adventurous. I would feel so self-conscious and embarrassed to travel to a country where I didn't know the language. It seems like the rest of the world goes out of their way to learn English, but we don't make much of an effort to learn other languages. I've been abroad enough, however, to know that it seems you can always find signs in multiple languages. That certainly isn't the case in the US. Unless you're someplace like a national park, it seems that everything is English-only with perhaps some Spanish. I hope you don't have any difficulties. But then again...that's the adventure!