One thing I’ve always thought about Thailand is that they’re extremely lucky to have the “Land of Smiles” moniker stuck to them. Not that I don’t think Thai people are friendly, just that, personally, I don’t think they’re any more or less friendly that most people you’d meet. The same goes for Japan – everyone I met was unfailingly polite, but not slobberingly so. One thing I did notice was that Japanese people in the role of service clerks – at least the ones I talked to – had pretty poor English skills when compared to Thailand. Simple questions were met with stone-frozen faces, somewhere between abject terror and total confusion. In Thailand, the English is generally much better