Coming back to Sweden, it always takes time to get used to be in what used to me my home country. After a week or two I feel quite at home but when arriving I always feel a bit like a tourist coming to visit another country. The people look different, the customs are different, […]
Recently we came across the first snow of the year, and I am happy to say that I was as excited as my son. As he learned one year ago when we visited Sweden for Christmas, playing in snow is a world of it’s own. There is something magical about being in a white landscape,
A day not long ago I got quite nostalgic. It was the first time I have experienced nostalgia just by riding on a highway, but there I was, sitting next to my son in the back seat, looking out of the window at the mountains flying by, and nostalgia hit me. It was not seeing
Making gingerbread cookies is a Swedish Christmas tradition that our son has grown very fond of. This year he started out by using the shapes and making hearts and stars and Santas, but also he took some creative liberties and created a host of figures and animals from his own imagination. Thus we ended up
I have become quite fascinated by Japanese surnames, and it is a pleasure to just walk around and looking at the nameplates outside houses, trying to read the kanji and get their meaning. Seeing a Japanese name often brings out a very vivid picture in me as there is a lot of nature and culture
Ever since he was one, our son has been happily greeting people we are meeting in passing. When he sees a neighbor walking by he opens the window and says good morning or hello, when we are out walking he always says hello to the people we meet, and the other day his aptitude for
Every autumn our son’s kindergarten organizes an art exhibition with objects and pictures that the children have created since summer. Our son has been very secretive about what they are doing. The last few weeks, when coming home he did not want to share much of his day in anticipation of having his parents come
I had decided I would wait with a Christmassy post at least until middle of December, but finding myself unexpectedly in Tenjin, the center of Fukuoka, one day last week – well what can I say, there were simply too many Santas to avoid showing a photo of them. Next to Naka river, in front
Suddenly the other day, my computer just decided to stop working, entering an endless loop of reboots that turned out to be caused by a “fatal error”, whatever that might mean. Even though I have mostly been using photos taken with my phone for this blog, writing a blog on a phone is not so
Every weekday I put the alarm at 7.15 to have time to do all the morning preparations in a not-so-stressful pace before going to the kindergarten bus with our son. (Although sometimes I treat myself to a little snooze if I managed to prepare his clothes and bags the night before.) On Saturdays however, we
Halloween was not over until the Christmas decorations started to pop up in stores and windows. My son was very happy when he saw the first Christmas tree of the season on the counter of a cake shop in the local shopping mall and started to talk about putting up decorations at home as well.
An integral part life in Japan is obento, Japanese lunch boxes (or just bento with the o being there only for politeness). Bento is simply put a proper meal with rice or noodles and fish or meat and vegetables and other Japanese foody necessities, all packaged in a box. Bento lunch boxes are for many