Message from Japan

My brother Amal who is on holidays with his family in Japan sent me this very funny message:

Almost had a quarrel with my wife yesterday. we had reached that stage in zonkeddness where we take half a day to decide where to go; arrive in the subway, fall asleep, wake up to realise we're going in the wrong direction and will soon reach some decrepit suburb with tatooed guys walking their pitbulls, scramble back towards the city centre and in the middle of this half conscious haze she decides that she wants to visit the yasukuni shrine. me: 'but that's where they worship their war criminals' she: 'it's just a few of them who are war criminals'. me: 'but you can't go there. it's their criminals. you go worship your own criminals.' fortunately she did not hear that last one.i hope she does not come up again with that idea today. to be fair to her, she was not the only one to come up with strange ideas. i suggested a neighbourhood called kagurazaka which is the french quarter of tokyo. it's ultra chic. we almost went there, thank god we did not, i don't think I could have handled a double whammy of franco-japanese refinement. quaint cobblestoned alleys lined with geisha courtyards, avant garde art galleries, conceptual stylists, fusion restaurants...already in kyoto we got badly put down when the kids said they were famished, and we couldn't find a place to eat. out of desperation we entered a bakery named 'Chez Amal' (no joke!) but it only had the daintiest little chocolate cakes i've ever seen. the kind of thing you're supposed to nibble along with organic coffee from Uganda or somewhere like that. then the girl told us we couldn't eat the stuff in the shop and we returned it.

Me: You should have taken a pic of the signboard, we would have shown it to the relatives and told them that you recycled into bakery in Japan. That would have been the talk of the town.

We already have a baker in the family: remember popol, in australia? but yes I should have taken a photo of Chez Amal. I guess the owner is an arab lady, or a fan of Amal Clooney.