Easy breezy Japanese-y: My winter break in Japan.

Until a few years ago, this was the extent of what I knew about Japan.

First, there’s anime. I may have to return my nerd card for saying this, but I’ve never boarded the anime train. (Pokemon and Attack on Titan are exceptions.) My best friend from middle school drew bizarre comics featuring me, herself and Vegeta from Dragonball Z. That didn’t help much.

There are also bizarre things in Japan, including vending machines of used underwear, hotels run by robots, and over-the-top commercials.

Ashamedly, that was it. That was all I knew until my boyfriend’s father, who lived and taught in Japan, broadened my otherwise narrow-minded view of Japanese culture. Past Whitney would never believe me, but I grew to love and respect it.

When my boyfriend’s family invited me to join them on their trip to Japan for New Year’s, I couldn’t pass it up.

I’ve never been out of the country before — which made the 10-hour plane flight and the 16-hour time adjustment brutal — so I learned a lot from my almost two-week visit.

It was my first experience with being an ethnic minority, especially growing up in Utah “vanilla ice cream” United States. Residents of cities are used to foreigners, but I occasionally received stares and was rarely assumed to be dumb for being American. I imagine the judgments probably had less to do with me being white and more to do with me getting used to things.

Culture shock happens when you visit a foreign country, no matter how much research you do beforehand. It was mostly small things, like standing to the side of the escalator to let other people walk past or not putting chopsticks in the bowl, which is done at funerals.

I’m also grateful I learned some Japanese before visiting, even if I’m by no means great at it yet. Many signs had English translations, and a fair number of people spoke English. However, this wasn’t always the case. I found a lost souvenir by awkwardly stringing together the words for “paper,” “bag” and “over there.”

My advice is, in the very least, master greetings, goodbyes, please and thank you when visiting any non-English-speaking country. Oh, and know how to ask where the toilet is. That’s a handy one.

I fully intend to visit Japan again someday, and traveling to another country is something I highly recommend.

The experience makes you much less ethnocentric. You see things being done differently, and sometimes better, than in America. I want to marry their train system and have 10,000 little train babies.

While some people may laugh at “those wacky Japanese,” it’s not as bizarre in the context of their culture.

Besides, there are odd things about American culture that we don’t think are strange because we’re used to it. A talking gecko sells car insurance. No one in America thinks twice about it.