Being alone in a foreign country

Hey! Hey!
Forgive me if something similar has been posted earlier.


I finished school awhile back and decided to take a year of to recharge my batteries, travel a bit and just relax before attending college. I’ve been doing absolutely nothing these past 9 months except reading books, computer-related-stuff, smoking cigarettes & patiently waiting for friends to get off work/come home from school. It was my intention from day 1 to travel at least a few months towards the end of the year.

To make a long story short, I decided to travel to Japan for 2 months whereas my dad will be travelling with me for the first 14 days to prevent that “initial shock” and to spend some time with his son. Then I’ve got 1½ month to spend on my own exploring Japan.

I can’t help but worry about how I’ll deal with being alone far, faaaaaaaaar away with a culture I can’t identify with, a language I barely can understand and no one to turn to except myself. I’m a seasoned traveller, I’m quite used to big cities, foreign cultures/languages, but this is the first time I’ve had to embrace it on my own.

I’m leaving in 16 days, and if anyone has experienced something similar, and would like to share their experience/views/ideas, how they dealt with it, or just general tips, please, post here.

Thanks a bunch for any reply!

Yours, ReWOLF.

Enjoy it. You have to be grateful for having your parents' support so use those 14 days with your dad to sort out all the problems you think you might have without him like buying food, hotels, ATM machines, etc.

The problem of tourist in the foreign country is, they are hardly able to make friend with local people because he dont have any real objective there. Still, it would be nice if you could make a friend or two. Try to introduce yourself to some people living close to you.

Japan seems very westernized, it shouldn't be so different from where you're from... as long as you speak *some* japanese. You said that's a language you can "barely understand". That looks like the biggest issue. What're you going to do when you're there on your own? o_O

Yeah try picking up some japanese before you go.
And of course you should definately go out or something. You know go see a few bands try to meet people.

Maybe make some friends before? like penpals?! (In this case maybe it'd be better using E-pals!) I already have one from Japan though I don't think I'd visit there anytime soon. That's what I did before visiting Italy.

Luckily, Japan is a pretty foreigner friendly place. In the big cities, there's usually enough English signage/advice that you can get by if you don't know any Japanese. If you're daring enough to explore in the quieter places of Japan (which you should definitely do, if you have the chance) you won't find as much English help (or people who know it) but most locals will be glad to try and help you however they can, even if the communication might be a bit tough.

Speaking from my experience in Japan, it is a little tough sometimes to be alone. A couple times in Tokyo, I got overwhelmed by all the people there, I needed to take a breather every now and then. But the great thing about being alone is that you can go at your own pace. You can do as much or as little as you want each day, which makes travel a little bit easier. You give up a little bit of companionship to have the freedom to do what you want to do, when you want to do it.

Plus, I remember many times that I got lost in Japan, but glad that I didn't have to worry about explaining the fact that I got on the wrong train to anyone else ^^;

You'll have fun. Just have a pretty good travel plan in place, which is just common sense. You know, what you'll do for food, where you're gonna stay, stuff that any good traveler would do. After that, you'll be fine.

My experience was on a much smaller scale, as I went to Japan for two weeks with three of my friends. One of my friends' parents works for Delta Airlines, so we were all able to get standby tickets for super cheap. As you may or may not know, with a standby ticket you can only get on the plane if they have enough room. Anyways, when it came time to leave, all my friends were able to squeeze themselves on the plane and I had to stay for four days by myself.

In some ways it's a lot of fun, and in other ways it kind of sucks. You're basically free to do whatever you want, see what you want to see, and whatever. Downside is that you get kind of lonely.

Tokyo is an awesome place where it's pretty easy to find stuff to do. I kind of made a little home for myself at one of my favourite restaurants, and ate lunch there every day. The waitress there started saying 'hi' to me, so it was nice to have a little contact with people. Had I had more money, I definitely would have gone to do more stuff, but since I was kind of tight on cash, I ended up sleeping at an internet cafe every night, and keeping my stuff in a locker at the airport. So I wasted a lot of time having to transport my stuff around and moving back to the internet cafe every night. If you're in the same place for the entire two months, it'll be nice to have a place to come home to every night, leaving you a lot more freedom to do stuff.

The only problem for me was that my friends and I did all the tourist stuff pretty agressively, so we hit most of the major landmarks we wanted to see while we were still in a group. Also, I had to check back at the airport every day at 2pm for flights back home, so it messed up any chance of going on a day trip to some place out of the city, or getting to anywhere early in the day. A lot of parks and museums close up around 4:30pm, so by the time I got back into the city, I already couldn't visit a lot of places.

Anyways, let me tell you that not knowing Japanese is not an issue. A lot of people will have at least enough English to understand what you want, and almost every restaurant has a picture of every item on their menu. The subway system takes a bit of getting used to, so read up on it if you want to save yourself some hassle. Aside from that, you should probably be fine. I bought a really great travel book for Japan called "Eyewitness Travel Guides: Japan" which always gave me tons of ideas of stuff to check out, and it has lots of information for what to do if you're ever in an emergency situation as well, so I'd recommend it.

Even though I talked about most of the negative stuff in this post, staying there for only two weeks definitely wasn't enough for me, so I'm sure you'll have a great time staying there for two months.

Damn! Can I go to!? I can be your translator... sort of anyway...