Chatting to Loony, Archie & Tom at Archie's chilli & film night last night, ("Netflix & Chilli"), about my recent visit to Tokyo, one of the most challenging but amusing parts of the whole trip was trying to describe where I wanted to go to taxi drivers when we spoke completely different languages.
I had no phone signal, so couldn't use Google Maps or a translator app' & had tried taking screenshots of addresses while I had the use of wi-fi in the hotel or just writing the address down, but apparently the Japanese write them in a different format, starting at the most general area & narrowing it down to an individual building -so county or province, then street, then house number, then name -which is a more logical method than ours I guess.
They were able to pick out bits of the address, but it still caused a lot of confusion & several times I was left in the back of a taxi while the driver took my phone to show the screenshot to a local.
"Can you take me to Tokyo Zoo please".
...blank look.
"Zoo" -ahh, obviously the Japanese word for zoo sounds nothing like the English one & you can't read English & I can't write Japanese. Just saying "Zoo" slowly & clearly isn't going to help us is it.
How do you communicate that? I may be 6,000 miles from home & never likely to meet this guy again, but I refuse to try & mime zoo animals to him. I'm just too British for that. Maybe I'll just go shopping instead.
"Zoo -I'd like to see the Giant Pandas".
Aha! That worked. Seems "Panda" is common to both languages. He grins & mimes the dark rings around a Panda's eyes at me.
"Yes". Yes, take me to the bears with binoculars.
Even if that's not a zoo, it'll be worth seeing.
And off we go.
Yeah, I'm totally rockin' this travel thing