26th Nov 2006

Had a good sleep, then a shower. Amble about having breakfast then I get a call from Mike at 10am to meet up at Shinjuku to say a final goodbye to Marc. We head to the bookshop again so that Marc can get the books that he wants…including ‘Captain Underpants’ what a cool name for a book!...then we go for lunch at a tempura restaurant. We sit at the counter, behind which there are about 4 tenpura chefs working away and behind them a tank full of prawns who are scuttling about at the bottom…while we are chatting away our chef suddenly pops two very bemused looking prawns on the counter just in front of us and says something in Japanese…I didn’t hear what he said but my instinctive reaction was to wave hello to the little prawns…Marc meanwhile was in midflow of talking and sonly realised the prawns were there just as they were being whisked away…anyway they came back half a minute later having been beheaded and tenpurified…they were sooooo tasty…not the nicest way to die for the prawn…but his demise was a very tasty one…well for we anyway. We also had squid, which was very fresh…I could tell because it didn’t have the consistency and taste of old rubber…Marc at some point managed to mistake the soy sauce pot (which looks much like a tea pot) for tea and proceeded to pour rather a lot of soy sauce in to his tea cup, much to Mike’s amusement, who saw exactly what was going on but had obviously decided that it was funnier to watch than to intervene…

A delicious lunch later, we headed off to Shinjuku station to put Marc on to the Narita express to the airport…