One thing I always dreaded (irrationally, yes) as a solo backpacker in lands I never visited before was the language barrier and adjustment of customs. Despite devoting time and effort to at least researching the basic ones to remember, as an introvert, I sometimes get too shy to exercise some of those out and I fall back to things I am more comfortable with.
For example… my 2019 trip to Japan. I was at Nara. On the second day, I went to a family restaurant beside my hotel to have a cheap breakfast. No biggie, menu had an English version and the waitress was quick to whip out the English menu board when I asked “英語のメニューがありますか”, and I had a pleasant and hearty breakfast. After breakfast was a nightmare. Some old lady was mumbling near the cashier, unfortunately she was in the narrow lane towards it. The lane was good enough for two people so I went past her. She did not like it and started hurling expletives at me. I knew they were expletives. I just hurriedly paid for my meal and went out, thankfully the cashier was thinking the same thing and expedited the transaction.
When I went to other countries, I always instinctively looked for places that looked like they have at least some form of English support. If a place had no English signage anywhere, I avoided it. If I really wanted to try it, I always see if there’s delivery app options. When I went to Seoul, I did a combination – I went to restaurants that had some English menu up front, and I splurged later on Shuttle and Yogiyo as well. But I saw a lot of restaurants along the way near my hotel near Myeongdong that looked cool but from a cursory glance I could not tell if they will have English support, so I skipped a lot until I found one.
But there’s always a place somewhere in these countries that wholeheartedly has some form of English support but it’s the place I always dread in some form – the tourist traps. Osaka’s Dōtonbori, no problem. English is well-known there. I mentioned Myeongdong earlier, the closer you get to the main streets and commercial shopping areas, English is more visible. Thailand, it’s less of an issue in Bangkok. English is simply a “support” there, so most establishments near malls and Westernized restaurants has English. But when you go to, say, Ayutthaya, English in some areas get to be fewer and fewer – you can still get by with “please”, finger numbers, and “thank you”, so not that bad really.
Taipei is no problem for tourists. It’s a modern city, so English is more like a “we’re open for business to everyone” vibe. They speak Mandarin/Chinese but they can adjust when they have a non-speaker as a customer. Fortunately the places we went to outside of Taipei were mostly tourist areas, so English was visible and at least decently supported.
Briathrail // Albert 2MNG 
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