„Good evening. We would like to have dinner.“
“Aligado sumimasen. Do deri deres!”
Hääää???

Well, whatever. We will never be understood. And neither will we be able to order dinner. If it was not for the self-made Christmas cookies Nicole brought along from Switzerland, we would hardly be alive after 5 days on the road in Japan.
Tonight we have made another trial (and error…) in a small restaurant in Aomori. By pointing to the beer in the Sapparo beer commercial on the wall I was at least able to get something to drink. Nicole had more troubles than I did: what the hell is “a Diet Coke, please” in Japanese??
Then we asked for the menu. I knew that I have to explain this with my arms – painting a square menu card in the air. “This worked in Cambodia and so it will work in Japan!” I thought. And it would indeed – if there was a menu card available at all.
The various dishes are explained in Hieroglyphs (or what to you call the Japanese letters again?) on papyrus over the bar. No translation in English is available.
Just guessing what it might be, does not work – once upon a time in Tokyo I had ordered just by pointing at various items – and I got three different coli flower dishes (I do not like coli flower at all!). And it is all more complicated since Nicole does not like meat and fish too much.
However, being a natural blond girl with a stunning smile, it is Nicole who enables us to get at least some food on the table: the business men at the bar are only too eager to help her with what little they know of foreign languages – we got potato salad, tomato salad and cucumber salad – all translated by Mr. Yoshika and Mr. Hionda. Luckily, another late coming business man was ordering food, too, and I was able to get Sashimi and some very tasty squids by pointing to his plate and saying “me too, I want!”
 
Realizing that we would need food every day, we came to the conclusion that we have to study Japanese. Therefore we listen carefully to our navigation system lady who talks – guess what – Japanese only.
Also the touch-screen is explained in Japanese sign language only, but – and this saves us – we are able to enter our daily destinations with phone numbers of hotels and tourist offices. Then we have to press one button three times in a row (this was explained to us by a friendly hotel manager in sign language) and after this we just follow the blue arrows on the screen. The lady keeps on talking meanwhile, but we have no clue whether she tells us how cool we are or that we should slow down because there is a lot of snow on the road.
Talking about snow: There indeed is a lot snow on the road. And since I once again was not allowed to drive my Swiss Toyota on Japanese roads, I cannot rely on 4WD and hard-core tyres… We had to get a rental car – and these morons did not equip the car with winter tyres (we found out as soon as there was the first snow on the road which was 600km North of Tokyo). Now we are calling half Japan (that is all Toyota/Hertz rental agencies) in order to get our tyres changed. NOBODY speaks English. It is unbelievable – we talk to employees of a company who is supposed to deal with stupid tourists daily, and NONE of their employees is willing to talk to us. Now we have delegated the whole problem to Hertz Switzerland – they should have some fun, too! Meantime we bought snow chains (not that we got any help with that from the friendly smiling shop assistant who until the last moment thought that we needed alloy wheels). Wish us luck. The Japanese winter will be hard.