Hai

Today we were going to take the children to story time at Tall Tales on Fort Street in Victoria again.  It’s a nice place and there is free coffee and armchairs aplenty for grown ups.  Plus the owner’s daughter has taken a shine to Matilda and we get better seats and preferential treatment.  Unfortunately everyone slept in this morning, except me.  As previously mentioned, I am woeful, which meant I managed to spend large amounts of the darkling morn reading several hundred more pages of War and Peace. I am now on page 600.  Only another 800 to go and I am home free.  Bloody good job I am enjoying it.

So, we didn’t make it to story time.  We did make it to Russell Books on Fort Street.  Sidney is Book Town round here, which is why we make our base there.  There are about eight bookshops in a town twice the size of Glenfield.  Victoria does not have this smorgasbord, but it does have Russell Books.  This is an enormous, tardis of a shop which sells new and second hand books and which goes on for miles, and miles, and miles.  We spent an hour in there browsing around and accumulating more things.  Our excess baggage bills are going to be insane.

After intensive bibliophilia (is that a real word?) we were hungry.  Today we decided to try Teppanyaki.  I have made an interesting discovery about the children.  They are much more comfortable eating entirely foreign foods that they have never tried before than they are eating food which they think they like and are familiar with but which turns out to be subtly different from what they are used to.  Hence our sudden exploration of Asian cuisine.  I thought Teppanyaki would be fun because of the spectacle more than anything.

We went to a place called The Japanese Village Restaurant, which came highly recommended by someone or other who I have been chatting to on my travels.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with this style of cooking it is Japanese, but it is not raw like sushi.  It is cooked, on a hot plate, in front of you.  You sit at a raised breakfast bar type affair around a rectangular metal hot plate.  The waitress takes your order and then the chef arrives to perform.  He  chops and dices and slices and fries and twirls the food around, cooking it at great speed and all this without chopping all his fingers off.  This place was fairly sedate in its cheffing, but I have been to places previously where the chefs chop the food in mid air and juggle their razor sharp knives in front of you.  As it was it was still pretty nifty:

This picture does not show it in all its glory, but I was seated between Tallulah and a Japanese man with no elbow room and can’t move around due to my old war wound, so this was the best I could do under trying circumstances.

We had fun.  I had chicken and shrimp, and the kids and Jason had beef and chicken.  You get it with Shobu green tea, veg, sticky rice and lots of dipping sauces.  Oscar was the only dissident, and during a hush in the proceedings commented loudly: ‘I wish this was McDonalds’.

Jason, who lived in Japan for six months, was trying to teach the kids to say thank you in Japanese, which I believe is Domo Arigato.  Oscar went up to the lady and said: ‘Don’t know Madagascar’ and gave her a huge smile.  It worked just as well.

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