I’ve never been quite sure how late you need to be to qualify as fashionably late, but we were late to the point where it morphs into surely they ought to be here by now?
That had The Sister out on the footpath scanning the horizon as The Rowdy Niece did her usual non-disruptive thing upstairs in a very good restaurant, turning out very good food in the French-Italian mode, although the portions as limited in size as you tend to find when you head over towards fine dining. The food went well with a good bottle of wine (a Gamay Pinot Noir blend) and the combination fuelled a lengthy and interesting conversation.
After lunch was out of the way we wandered off into the streets around Dotonburi, which provided an opportunity for a little subtle ribbing of The Rowdy Niece, who was obviously itching (not) to head off and let out her inner bullhorn wielder as a demonstration about something to do with Korea made its way along a busy street a couple of hundred metres ahead of us.
You could probably attribute the fact that we found ourselves away from major thoroughfares in interesting side streets to the need to keep Rowdy from expressing revolutionary tendencies, but it a desire to browse in an interesting shopping environment would be closer to the mark.
I happened to chance upon a music shop along the way, the sort of place where I could easily indulge in an extended browse and probably part with a substantial sum of money. But when you’ve got people waiting outside on the footpath, and you’re not familiar with the local geography that’s not an option.
It wasn’t long after that when we bade goodbye to our hosts on another footpath, outside the store where we were looking to buy pens to interact with our respective iPads.
Once we’d accomplished that task we made our way back to the hotel, landing there as much by good luck as good management. Actually, if we hadn’t spotted a familiar looking hotel on the other side of the road to reassure us we were headed in the right direction finding the place could well have been tricky. We knew we were headed in the right direction, but weren’t sure whether this was the right road.