How the other half lives...

Spent a rather lovely afternoon in Ginza with my Japanese Gran, Yukiko. First stop was a marvellous chicken restaurant called yakitori-tei, I cannot really do justice to the food because it it so good that it defies description, although I suppose it all depends on what you like... After that we strolled around in the pouring rain looking for dessert. Not much doing really, Yukiko took me to this "really famous fruits parlour"[sic]. As with most really famous things in Japan, it turned out to be a massive let down. Inside it looked like a 1950s imitation diner, pictures of the desserts plastered all over the walls and waiters and waitresses in 1950s uniforms which was interesting but the menu was sadly limited to fruit. Obviously. The strawberry and cream sandwich looked particularly gross, as did the variety of jellies so I opted for the chocolate parfait, imagining it to be largely comprised of chocolate. As usual, a completely stupid assumption on my behalf, when it turned up it was basically a confection of faker than usual whipped cream, fruit and a large amount of vanilla ice cream, topped by a mountain of fruit cut into giant chunks. Mango, I would have enjoyed, dragon fruit I would have scarfed down in a split second, apricot would have been acceptable, persimmon or cherries positively ambrosial, but what did I get? Grapefruit and a huge quantity of the most sour orange I have experienced in a long while. Oh, the smallest thread of chocolate sauce between layers of fake cream. What a con job.

Anyway, after that, it was still chucking it down, so we decided to go to one of Ginza's many luxury stationers (where my self restraint amazed me as I managed to leave without spending anything!) we took a small detour into Mikimoto which is a monumentally famous pearl specialist. And oh my, they were beautiful. We looked at one piece which was a mere two and a half million yen, I decided not to buy it this month... It turned out that one of the staff could speak rather good English so I asked him about the pearl process. I will not be wearing pearls in this lifetime. The pearls are either farmed or cultured in the sea, which means the oysters are forced to produce pearls. What happens to the oysters after you take the pearls, I asked him. They die. So what do you do with the oysters after that then? Well, some people eat them but they don't taste very good so they aren't very popular. So basically, an oyster died so that I could spend a million quid on a pearl? I don't think so.

It was STILL chucking it down and we thought seeing a film might be fun so we went to the discount ticket shop to find out what was on; faced with a choice between Eragon, which Yukiko hadn't read, Charlotte's Web, which will never live up to the book in a million trillion years, and Copying Beethoven, which we thought might be quite interesting. We went to the local art house cinema, via the Hello Kitty shop, and I decided to buy some caramel popcorn, which I promptly knocked all over the floor, of course. The film was ok, I have never been much of a Beethoven fan, I always think he's a bit grandiose, but I have now developed a new appreciation of his music. I won't bore you with the details of the story, it wasn't particularly convincing and Diane Kruger was a bit lame although Ed Harris was good. . . On the other hand, the music was sublime. It's worth seeing just for the scene where Beethoven conducts his newly finshed 9th symphony.