Visitor in town

Greetings blog readers,
There's been a lack of blog updates lately - my Mom was in town this week! She arrived Friday night to a meal of Tonkatsu (of course!) Instead of getting the pork cutlet, she settled for shrimp, chicken and oysters. She also thought it was good.

The week consisted of visiting parts of Tokyo and two fun filled trips to the "food court" at the department stores. Trip one, Mom wanted some veggies and settled on the celery, surprised by the outrageous prices. I guess groceries are much less in Phoenix then Mpls, let alone Tokyo. When she grabbed the celery - she realized one difference, it was sold per celery stalk here. Funny. She also just about fainted at the prices of fruit. Bill and I are not big fruit people - I think I've had a few oranges here? Anyhoo, she looked at the melon $5,000 yen... wait a minute, even if I remove the last two digits to convert to US (1:100), it's still fifty dollars. WHAT? Who would pay 50 bucks for a small canteloupe. Right next to that were two mangos - $10,000 yen. It's funny how quickly we've gotten over the sticker shock.

My Mom also experience Kobe beef for the first time and said, "wow, this is some good beef". Other fun festivities included purchasing a really cute "magnifying glass" in Ginza. At first, I was told that Ginza catered to the 30-40's+ female shopper. I didn't really notice anything different - Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Apple, etc. But my Mom was quick to point out - who would sell magnifying glasses right by the front entrance of a major department store? My bad- I probably walked by this place a dozen times and not noticed it.

Well - Bill will be updating w/ the pictures... I wasn't able to find the correct folder for the pictures, since we have a million of them by now... :)