Interacting with Japanese

In general, we don't interact with Japanese people that much, outside of purchasing things, because - well - we don't speak Japanese.

But, so far, vagually speaking, they ignore us. Not ignore in a bad way, but I mean, they don't pay any attention to us, unless we talk to them. At which point they are as helpful and polite as can be.

In purchasing things, generally we just point and gesture how many of each we want. This morning I had a 'croque monsieur' and Kim had a bagel, we both had lattes. So we just pointed to my croque and then pointed to me, then Kim did the same for the bagel, and then gave the "2" sign for the lattes. Then they said the price, which we read off of the cash register, handed them the money, took the change and we say some variation of "domo", "domo arigato", or "domo arigato gozea mast".

Today we were looking for a ramen restaurant. Kim likes ramen and yakisoba, fyi. Anyway we went into one place and inside the girl was cleaning the floor. We didn't know how to ask or gesture for when it was open. Then the cook came out to try her luck with us and gestured that they were closed. We pointed to the ramen and said that was what we were looking for. She invited us in. So I suspect they opened the restaurant, just for us for that time to give us ramen. Honestly I don't know. Maybe they were being super nice, maybe they were just confused and were open the whole time, or maybe they just saw that if they gave us some ramen, then the whole confusion would be over.