Thursdays are ballet days, and when my son has his lesson I have a weekly routine myself. After having dopped him off at the ballet studio, I go to the library in the community center next door to return books and borrow new ones. Of course there are no Swedish books available, but they do […]
As I wrote about last week it has been raining a lot, and the rain has continued. I have bad memories from times of heavy rain. When I was living in Sweden I experienced a big flooding in the village where I was living and houses were all surrounded by water from the overflowing river.
Our home is lying at the intersection of city and wilderness, but sometimes when I look out the window I feel like we must be living in the middle of the forest. Last week I twice saw a snake slithering its way down the road in front of the house, and one morning a monkey
We got a message from a friend who lives near a little river half an hour away. There are a lot of fireflies here now, do you want to come? Of course we wanted to! It was Sunday, a beautiful evening, and we made our way to see our friend just as the sun was
I guess it started last year already – the talk among parents at kindergarten about backpacks for elementary school children. Simply put, during the six years of elementary school, Japanese school children are using a special style of backpack called ランドセル, randoseru, from the imported Dutch word ransel meaning backpack. I have grown up with the
神待祭, Kamimachi Matsuri meaning waiting for kami festival, is an event held at our local shrine late every year. It is a festival to, with a bonfire, welcome the kami, god, who is said to return home from Izumo that night. We have never participated before, but since our son is growing up and had
There have been so many things happening this autumn and I would have had to write a couple of posts per week to cover what I would like to share. But since I am on a one post per week pace, my autumn stories will focus on the highlights, albeit sometimes presented a bit late. But
Living in a multicultural family, I want our son to whenever possible experience the cultures that both of his parent’s grew up in. I do my best to highlight Swedish traditions in our home, and when we visit Sweden he gets plenty of that. But equally important to me is to value the Japanese cultural
Every October, there is autumn cleaning going on everywhere. The parks are getting their final trim of the year and people are tidying up what is left of the summer from their gardens. Now that the temperature has dropped and nature’s extreme growing power has slowed down, it really feels quite satisfying to clean up
Every autumn, our son’s kindergarten organizes a sports day for the children. The practice for this day begins after the summer holidays and the children work hard every day to prepare for the sports day when parents and relatives come to watch and join in some activities. This year our son, now being in the
Time for the forth and final post on museums this summer. This time UNKO MUSEUM – the poop museum, a temporary museum in a building adjacent to the baseball stadium in Fukuoka. We had seen posters for this museum in spring when we went to a Tomica toy car event at the same venue and
Before the summer holidays begin and we will be focusing on small excursions, swimming school and other summery activities, I want to write a third kappa-related post. In my first post a month or so ago I introduced this mythological creature’s fancy for cucumber, and a few weeks ago I mentioned bowing being a kappa’s