Departure from Japan

Below is Mark's final post from Japan...

There hasn't been much down time available during my trip in which to post. With most of the day spent in factories and shops all over Osaka and Tokushima usually until dinner time, all of my free time is spent compiling data and working on reports. Oh and sleeping. However last night and the night before there was little time for even sleep. At work until 11pm Thursday and until 1:30am Friday! Work must happen.

But today is departure from Japan. I'm still trying to think in normal, native-speaker English again. the past week has been entirely broken English (sometimes referred to as "jinglish") there's a certain cadence to this type of speaking too. It seems to be understood more easily by the Japanese that way. It's a difficult thing to describe. Fortunately my host (and taxi driver, haha) does fairly well with English. He says my Japanese is better than his English, but I know he's just being modest. I've learned maybe 3 or 4 phrases...

So one more trip to get ramen then on to Kansai Airport to work my way through security and spend the next 40 hours or so traveling back home. Of course because of the time change only 6 hours will have passed on the clock.

I've got about 1,800 pictures total. 700 are work related and the rest are scenic trips, from the back seat of the car on the daily commute, and every meal, food or beverage I've had during the entire trip. Pretty awesome right? The network here is awful slow which is why I haven't been uploading much to the web. I'll be doing some trip reflection and postings over the following days with pictures included. I hope you look forward to that as much as I do.