@NintendoMonopoly,

I'd taken 2 years of Japanese, and then I'd taken 2 years off of Japanese and basically forgotten everything. I practiced by listening to a podcast in my car on the way to and from work, but it wasn't enough to prepare me. I barely spoke basic broken Japanese when I was there, but I got really good at asking for directions and ordering food when I was there. But for the most part people were friendly and would help me with my Japanese. It was only really old people and really young kids that stared at me everywhere. Middle-aged and younger folks were friendly everywhere. It's only when you get away from the big cities that you're absolutely fucked without Japanese. The big train stations have stuff written in English, and the small stations only have kanji. The big cities had tourist centers with maps, and once I had the maps and could find food, sleep, and internet, I was set.

I made friends just about everywhere except on Mt. Fuji, where I guess people were insulted by the stupid American tourist coming to climb their mountain or something, and a group of people pointed at me and laughed and called me gaijin. In Tokyo though, it was like "Hey American, come here, my friend needs to practice her English on you, HAHAHA!" and they'd make the girls in their group talk to me, and give me free beer, wine, and snacks.



@Galaki, my PC died because I tried to download Cooking Guide: Can't Decide What to Eat? and it was a virus. Fate doesn't want me to cook.

Man, porn have such subtle titles nowaday I couldn't tell if it's really a cooking guide or not...

         I think their used to tourist in the bigger cities. I'd like to believe people are generaly friendly and helpful, anyways.

         It doesn't matter for me, though. Whenever I do anything big, like go on a trip, I always like to be extra prepared. Unfortunately, that means sometimes I nearly worry myself crazy, thinking I've forgotten something. I was actually thinking of doing something spontanous, like going to the inaguration, just to say I was there. A historical event seems like a good excuse to check out the city, but I'm a little hesitant, because I know the traffic is going to be murder.

      You should upload some pics of your trip. Well I've got to be going soon.

you should look into getting a program like ghost or some kind of hard drive imaging/cloning program.

That way you can have a backup of your HD and if anything goes wrong, you can restore the sucker in 5 minutes.

I'm sure there are free versions of ghost out there. If not, you can always torrent one. But then again, torrenting is what got you into this whole computer mess in the first place ^_^

Man, that sounds nice (Japan, not the broken computer). Japan is #1 on my places-to-go list. First I need to finish this pesky school thing and then learn some Japanese (took a year of it, forgot most of it). Glad to hear you didn't lose those pictures.

And I also just fixed my computer after two weeks of instant blue screens. Those were boring weeks.