Vegetarian's food hell

Spent the morning working in the hotel room. Lots of emails to catch up on and planning what I needed to say at our meeting on Tuesday. Our shipment of journals, leaflets and pens seemed to be stuck in Tokyo according to DHL - bad news as we were hoping to set up the stand in the afternoon.

We walked over to the conference centre to find out where it was and sort out our exhibitor passes. It was only raining slightly when we set off and we'd been told it was only a 30 minute stroll. After 30 minutes and by now soaked to the skin, we sheltered under the porch of an office block to avoid a particularly heavy burst of rain. We became aware that the office workers inside were giving us funny looks and thought they might be plucking up courage to ask us to move on and stop cluttering up their entrance. As it was, a lovely lady came out with towels! Unfortunately, what we really needed by then was a fresh set of clothes. We pressed on and found the conference centre eventually leaving a trail of drips and making squelchy noises as we were directed to our stand.

Our boxes were waiting for us at the stand and we were able to set up properly ready for the opening of the conference the next day. We took the underground back to the hotel - it only took about 10 minutes and buying a ticket was very easy. We met up with some of our editors in the hotel bar that evening and went off to find somewhere to eat.

Most places had plates of brightly coloured plastic model food outside to show what was on the menu. We picked at random and it was only when we looked in detail at the menu that we realised it was purely pork-based. The table had a big pan of salted water in the middle. The idea was to cook long thin strips of pork in the boiling water by swishing it round with chopsticks - called shabu-shabu ( explanation from wikipedia). You then used the porky water to cook your vegetables. This was to be followed by more pork and then noodles to soak up all the porky goodness. Not very veggie-friendly! I managed to eat some of the par-cooked vegetables as they were and the staff kindly cooked some noodles for me in the kitchen in ordinary water so I could then add them to my own bowl of soup.