At lunch today ....

The three of us decided to go to a neighborhood Japanese restaurant for lunch today. It was actually a small family run restaurant with the folks living at the back. The kind where you sit on cushions on the floor and eat.
The owner was a lady in her sixties wearing a bright red lipstick and talking loudly and very brashly to one and all.
Anyhow they just had two types of lunch – sashimi (raw fish) with rice or vegetables with rice. A asked the lady if the vegetable with rice contained meat and she gave him a funny look and said off course –Pork. When he asked her if she could give him just the vegetables and rice without the meat she looked at him as if he had asked her to strip and do a jig in front of him. Remove the pork !! what ? why ??!! – I cant do that !(horror stricken face) So finally we just asked her to bring the whole damn thing and A spent 10 minutes fastidiously removing all the pork from his plate as well as the bits of octopus,squid,prawn, fish and other assorted sea food that came with it (To all the vegetarians in Japan -when a Japanese says vegetable dish it means it has vegetables along with the meat, and not just vegetables. Also for a Japanese sea food is not meat.)
Any how after she had served us she loudly regaled to the rest of her customers about how we came in and how one of us wanted her to remove the pork from the dish and how strange it was that some people just didnt want to eat her good meat !
The funniest part is she knew we all speak Japanese because all of us placed our orders in perfect impeccable Japanese (including the long winded conversation about removing the meat) and here she was sitting at practically the next table talking about us! What was she thinking!
And on the way out I forgot to close the door behind me – it was one of those Japanese sliding paper doors that you are supposed to slide shut on your way out - I realized my mistake when S asked me if I had shut the door.
We laughed all the way back imagining how this must be the highlight of her day. First four crazy Indians walk in and ask her to remove the meat from her good dish and then they forget to close the door on their way out ! Oh my goodness what audacity!!

It made a interesting lunch though and put some fun in the otherwise drab day !