When you’re traveling to foreign countries it isn’t always easy to get your message across. Sure, you could learn a few phrases by heart or bring a pocket dictionary, but in most cases when you do use your carefully learned phrases, the response you get is like a verbal avalanche that leaves you with a big question mark above your head and you still have no clue how to get to the post office or the loo. In most countries you can still decipher menus and road signs, but if you’re going to countries where the alphabet isn’t even the same as what you’re used to, then you’re in for some hard work.

On my trip to Japan it started as soon as we got out of the underground station. We had no idea what direction we should walk to in order to get to our hotel. Left, right, north, south, it all looked the same to us. A map wasn’t of much use either as we couldn’t decipher the names on the street signs or on the map itself. Luckily after we had been roaming around aimlessly for hours, we found a nice couple who spoke a little bit of English and they walked us to the place we were staying.

Ordering food wasn’t easy either. Although most Japanese restaurants have plastic versions of all the dishes they serve on display in the window, it’s still quite difficult to order the real versions once you’re inside the restaurant. It might look good in plastic, but you still don’t know what substance you will end up with on your plate. It could very well be the back side of some animal that we keep as pets here in the UK. At the restaurant we picked out on our first night in Tokyo, punters were supposed to place their order at a machine with numerous buttons next to which the names of the dishes were written out on stickers. In Kanji of course. The nice lady standing behind us in the queue offered to help us out, but she couldn’t speak anything else but Japanese. After we gave our best animal impressions we finally figured out which button was for the chicken and we put in our order. The Japanese chicken curry was very tasty, even though I thought it tasted a lot like beef. Pfff.

It’s not easy to get a decent meal on your holidays. But then again it makes a trip all the more interesting and fun. Although I have to admit that after a week of playing charades with the waiters at what really were lovely eateries, we did go to the Hard Rock Cafe in Ropongi and sunk our teeth in two juicy hamburgers. With chips. Very tasty as well and we didn’t even have to use our hands and feet to order them.

Xanthipe is a freelance travel writer who writes original beach and travel stories for http://www.abeachholiday.com – Read other beach and travel stories, submitted by Xanthipe, on A Beach Holiday