Day 21, in which Elizabeth Taylor gets drunk and screams in the garden

After a week of straight sunshine, we opened the curtains to find it pouring with rain. It was difficult, then, to carry out our plans of taking a day trip to one of Hakone, Yokohama or Kamakura. Instead we slept.

For Late Brunch (or 'Lunch', as it can be abbreviated), we made a second trip to the sushi belts of Maguro Bito – enjoying a largely new range of fishy treats, most of which did not involve sea urchin ovaries – before returning to our room to watch Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor battle it out in the superb Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Burton played an erudite, dissatisfied alcoholic who despises his wife, while Taylor played a drunken adulterer who despises her husband. From what I hear, they were not playing against type.

In the evening we trekked out to Yoyogi, where Tokyo's finest Cambodian restaurant Angkor Wat lives. Still marginally depressed by Japan's obsession with austerity cooking (last night, for example, we watched a cookery show in which the smiling chef took 20 minutes to demonstrate how to prepare the speciality of large daikon radish chopped into quarters and smeared in vinegar), Cambodian food came as a wonderful surprise: fresh varied salads drenched in tasty light dressings and chilli peppers; moist hot skewers of beef served with spicy relish; soft and succulent summer rolls; tasty and rich coconut ice-cream; and other very much non-Japanese treats. The Japanese like to keep rice pure during their meals, and nothing could better illustrate how different Cambodian cooking is than the fried rice served at the end of our meal: a mound of sea food, diced pork, spring onions, peppers and chilli, held together by the rice and the whole flavoured with a spicy dressing. I'm very much looking forward to visiting Cambodia in March.

While we were eating, I secretly thought how much Papa, the owner of Angkor Wat, reminded me of Paul's dad, but I didn't like to say anything. About ten minutes later Paul brought it up himself, and we agreed Papa was his Cambodian doppelgänger. We felt very much at home after that.