Being alone in a foreign country

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.

Jam it back in, in the dark.