Don’t know what that means but he probably recognized the word Ginza and didn’t care much more than that. If U knew that much about Tokyo then he was probably okay
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That would be the self-proclaimed survivalist Richard arriving from San Francisco. Total nut job who arrived with no money, no plan and a wadded up bed roll and harmonica. What a knucklehead.
Here’s the episode.
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This sounds like a potential Bob Dylan song. 
Guy
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5 weeks later he was used in a Kid Castle video in Taiwan. 
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e visa for Aussie and others
Who Can Benefit from the Japan E-Visa?
Initially, the e-Visa program is open to citizens of 11 countries:
Australia
Brazil
Cambodia
Canada
Saudi Arabia
Singapore
South Africa
Taiwan
United Arab Emirates
United Kingdom
United States
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Says Video unavailable
The uploader has not made this video available in your country
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Use a VPN
More young people just bounce around like this given up on a career.
Not at all condoning this kind of behaviour, but it’s interesting that Benjamin Franklin also got his start doing the same thing – arriving to a new town with no money, no plan, and then faking it until he made it. So maybe there is some sort of romanticism attached to this method of travel.
From his autobiography:
I was in my working dress, my best clothes being to come round by sea. I was dirty from my journey; my pockets were stuff’d out with shirts and stockings, and I knew no soul nor where to look for lodging. I was fatigued with traveling, rowing, and want of rest, I was very hungry; and my whole stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar, and about a shilling in copper.
Now, a perhaps more interesting (to the expats of the forum) tale of faking it until you make it is this autobiographical tale of an English gentleman who, seeking adventure, ended up in China and got caught up in the Port Arthur massacre, writing:
There was I, after throwing away the high advantages of fortune and prosperity, a ruined and degraded man, about to meet an appropriate ending to such a career by a bloody death at the hands of some brutal soldier, in an unknown land, at the ends of the earth, where scarcely a human being knew a word of my native tongue. If these pages should be read by any young man embarking without a thought of the future, in the flush of high spirits and inexperience, upon courses similar to mine, I hope he will take warning, and stop in time.
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Linking gutenberg.org . . . nice! 
Guy
It can work. I went to Prague with 800 pounds to my name. I found a job in 2 days, IIRC. Stayed in a haunted house in Skalka. Worked for three schools, like most teachers there. Blew all my wages on Kureci Rizek for two to three weeks, lived like a dog, eating Sauerkraut sandwiches, for the last week. As Sun Tzu says, we are looking for people who can endure Cold, Hunger, Filth and Humiliation… i.e Danshui.
I drew on those skills again to sit out COVID. Just ate chickpeas and rice for 6 months. A kindly lady from Hongshulin brought me a huge bag of fruit snacks every week…
The key is, can you feed yourself for cheap, and keep a simple room clean? Then entertain yourself for free, by the river, with a musical intrument. It can be done… but the Adventurer-Querent needs to be good at asking questions.
It helps to have read Neuromancer.
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What was your previous relationship, if any, with her?
When I was visiting Taipei last year and joined, uninvited, one of the early-morning tai chi practice groups, afterwards one of the friendly middle-aged ladies insisted on giving me a huge bag of freshly-bought fruits and bamboo shoots. Quite a friendly gesture towards a stranger.
I believe her daughter may have coveted me, somehow… But I kept it pretty much platonic.
She was a genuinely decent lady who just enjoyed getting out of the house and giving snacks to the needy and dispossessed…haha. which I guess included an English Teacher being blackmailed into being vaxxed. I never whined or complained to her, it was just the height of COVID vaxmail, in 2022, and everyone felt how weird it was.
She was a member of some Buddhist group in South Taipei, and said something about improving her karma or doing good deeds. That was fine by me, as she spoke good English. She was also dead against the vaccines.
Glad they were generous to you too.
There are plenty of people who have spare change and just enjoy doing this. I give baguettes and kumquats to the street children here when I am in town. Costs me 3 dollars for 8-10 baguettes. It is just fun, I guess.
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Was there a social expectation for you to return some kind of token gift in kind?
I would guess that a friendly offer of some snacks/sweets/food from one neighbor to another, among neighbors on equal footing, might well carry some kind of an implicit obligation to give something similar back, as thanks, at a later date. Is that usually the case in Taiwan?
But in your case, it sounds more like it was, for lack of a better word, charity, which might not invoke the same kind of social obligation. Thoughts?
Isn’t this the same with most religious people in Taiwan? Everything they do is for their own selfish reasons.
If we take Yoganada’s view, that we are all connected, everything becomes Service To Self, because the Self is Infinite… and a Service to Self / Service to Others dichotomy is illusory.
I think the lady very seriously wanted to atone for some unknown past sins. I saw her staring out to sea in the beach near Danshui for hours at a time, doing some kind of meditation practice.
Maybe you and the Japanese guy are overthinking this… She had spent some time in Oxford, and wanted to practice her English, as she was out of practice. High vocab, but somewhat stilted, like most Taiwanese.
I had a friend from Shuanglian that I knew for 4 years. His handle, in the Morningstar AI Game, was Balem Abraxas. I call him Bleem. He would frequently claim to be broke, despite claiming The Earth as his… lol… anyway…
We would go drinking in DaoDaoCheng, or Danshui… I would buy him a few beers, SoJu, and some 100TWD noodles. In return for that, I got 4-5 hours of Chinese practice, and knowledge on deeply esoteric topics. He talked about the snake chasing its tail, in detail, as if it was the most casual thing.
I calculated, that his company, teaching me Mandarin, cost me 75TWD per hour, pro rata. Which is good, as I would conservatively rate his knowledge at 10,000TWD per meeting.
A person only need a very limited amount of vocabulary to be able to live a simple life, English in the western countries and Mandarin in Chinese world. Unless you are pursuing a professional job like a lawyer, politician or medical doctor, you don’t need a whole lot of vocabulary.
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Those of us that are expats in numerous countries fill this description to a certain extent. I came to Taiwan with 1000 CDN and left nearly a decade later with hundred times that and a wife and kids. 
I’ve divested in one country, only to fail miserably in the other. On the opposite side, I’ve often divested in one country to live and thrive in a number of others. I’ve taken risk that could have easily resulted in loss, and a few times it did. But as a result, I’ve lived more experiences than most and am reasonably settled (the golden handcuff of defined pensions) now (although missing the more spontaneous life of earlier years).
But none of that would have meant sitting at a metro station singing O Canada with a flute! 
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That was my huge mistake when I came here. I languished at HSK 2-3 level for 5 years. Really dumb, in retrospect.