Last blog from Japan

We arrived over five weeks ago speaking only three words of Japanese. I quickly dropped 'sayonara' which I thought was goodbye but nobody seemed to recognise, and just stuck with hello and thank you. Those remaining two words saw us through some interesting and exciting times.
The weather has mostly been kind with a great final sunny day today. We first saw this strange giant green Teddy bear in Osaka in the rain yesterday, and you can see how much happier he is today.

There is a great building behind him in the second photo where we went to the top, and there is a huge open hole where the information leaflet seemed to imply that a spaceship could Dock, or even just float away.
Yesterday I posed in an Easter themed photo booth, and both of these things give an idea of how weird Japan can be.

Tonight we went out to a little Japanese restaurant where we had to queue outside before eventually getting a seat. It was teppanyaki style and they cooked our food on a hot plate in front of us and we even tried the beef, although I am not sure if it was the real Kobe thing.
Finally, Daz has put together a map of our travels and you can see that we have just about covered the whole of the country, only missing the top of Hokkaido because it was covered in snow.