Just came back from a solo trip to Japan. Here are some things I learned

I just returned from a 7 day solo trip to Japan. Before departing, I read a lot from this sub and a lot of other sources, but there is only so much I could learn from this. Here are some things I learned during my travel:<br><br>- **I learned to read the bus stop and bus information signs enough to be able to use all of them**. Most of the time there is an English option available, but I learned to recognize bus stops and routs in Japanese and used that more than the English setting. (I can recognize some hiragana characters, but not kanji)<br><br>- **I did not see a single McDonald's or KFC in my whole trip to Japan**. Plenty of Seven Eleven, Family Mart, and Lawson, but no international fast food restaurants.<br><br>- **Buses and trains are a lot more expensive than I thought they would be**. <br>- A bus ride is between 220 and 310 JPY (depending on the area). A short bus ride can also be very expensive.<br>- A single train ride can cost anything between 220 and 410 JPY. A lot of places have different company-owned trains and stations, so you need to pay again to switch trains.<br><br>- **Many restaurants and ramen bars have English menus available if you ask**. Some places have English menus printed as well, but not all. I just asked "English?" and they often gave me an English version. <br><br>- **Pepsi is a lot more common than Coca Cola in Japan**. I grew up in a country that uses Coca Cola and I have never seen a ratio of Pepsi:Coca Cola higher than 2:1. In Japan there is a lot more pepsi, and it makes me wonder what that says about the Japanese people.<br><br>- **Many restaurants do not have a restroom**. I often had to use a convenience store to go to the bathroom. Some restaurants have a bathroom, but they ask you not to use it for things other than peeing. I think the reason for this is that they just do not have a lot of space in Japan to create adequate restrooms in their restaurants.<br><br>- **I never saw a single homeless person in Japan**. This could be because I was in big cities (Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto) and there is a lot of safety measures to keep them away, but I never saw a single homeless person. <br><br>- **I did not see a single police officer during my whole trip to Japan**. Before leaving I thought they would have signed all major points of interest down by police, to keep the tourists in check, but that was not the case at all.<br><br>- **There are a lot more gaijins (foreigners) in Japan than I thought**. I have been to many places in Asia and a lot of other places all over the world, and I never felt like I was in a place where I could not see a foreigner for hours on end. Japan is not like that. I actually walked past groups of (what seemed like) Japanese just as often as I saw groups of (what seemed like) international tourists.<br><br>- **There is a difference between OK and OKAY**. I am from a country that has English as a second language. We have a lot of English in school, but when I say "okay" back home, I pronounce it more like "o'kay". The difference is that the Japanese "okay" is more like "ohkay", and sounds a bit like "oh care", which is something entirely different. "O'kay" sounds more like "ohkai" to them, which doesn't mean anything.<br><br>- **Japanese people are a lot easier to talk to than I thought**. I read all about how difficult it is to get Japanese people to talk to you. This is not true at all. Either they have adapted to becoming more tourist-y, but every time I talked to a Japanese person, they would really go out of their way to speak to me in English if they could. Some store clerks would speak entire English sentences to me and then apologize when they realized it was full of mistakes.