Japan Trip

The Japan trip is about 97% certain now, and we've come up with a nice itinerary. It's all very exciting and everything looks beautiful!

http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2400.html

I've found this site especially invaluable, and basically modified their 20 day itinerary to cut out Nagasaki and work in more nights staying with friends.

I'm wondering yet again how people with no knowledge of foreign languages plan trips. Even planning my trip to Scandinavia (Scandinavia! Where they all speak English!) I found myself grateful on numerous occasions to be able to read Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish. Japan is a lot harder, and my knowledge of Japanese is less than my knowledge of Finnish, but I think even the small amount Laura and I know, in addition to having some translators on call, are making it possible.

For an example of what we're dealing with, check out this website:

http://www.sanboin.com/

This was one of the most navigable temple stay websites we found, and we think we're going to use it, although if we read Japanese perfectly we might be able to find a slightly cheaper one. As it was we used all of our Japanese just to find the site, navigate it (one of the six, seven? English words helped us find the 'stay' section), figure out that "一人様 9,500円" meant "one person... 9,500 yen", and that the little button at the bottom of that page means email reservation, or something like that. Even this little amount required knowing several Kanji. I know about 50 Kanji and Laura knows probably about 200 (I'm not sure). We are finding ourselves needing every bit of that, and still confirming most things with one of the Japanese girls.

Anyway, we are planning to email this temple in Japanese, with the Japanese girls translating "We are two American women wanting to stay in the temple on July X, for one night... we see that your prices are 9,500 per person including Breakfast and Dinner, and you are in Koyasan. Can we confirm all of this and get directions? We speak only a small amount of Japanese." and seeing if we can't get a reservation. Mostly we are staying with friends or cheapish tourist hotels, but we are staying in more authentic places 3 nights, so we expect to go through a similar process at least two more times.