Welcome to FFXIV ^^

I hope you enjoy the game and stick around until all the major changes are done. For the "stillness" of town, you get less of that feeling when there are lots of people like in Ul'Dah but, I am pretty sure they will get to add more life to cities once they fix the major stuff.

Along with that, you might get the feel that the zones are bland, while very beautiful, after doing a lot of leves, but they already have redesigns of the zones planned and they are already in the level design stage of it so don't get desperate if it bothers you.

Yes playing on international server is fun I find, if you want to talk to japanese people (or foreign players) you can use the auto-translate function by pressing TAB when you start wrting your word. You'll see a list of word or sentences and when you select it it will appear in between red and green parentheses ^^ it's fun to use and you'll get to know what you can say and what isn't in there.

All in all, they are adding tutorials and changing crafting in the next patch which should be by the end of august or early september I'd say (1.19, a major patch) so you can either wait to start crafting or if you want to try it for now, you can look online for recipes.

~cheers and have fun in Eorzea!