I love going on road trips around Kyushu with my wife and son. We try to do this from time to time, go and explore exciting places on our beautiful island, eat tasty local food, and take onsen baths. There are so many places I want to experience, the nature and culture really mesmerize me
In our everyday life I have tried to naturally incorporate different learning situations for my son that does not feel like a study session. He helps me write shopping lists, he writes cards and we make treasure hunt games for each other where we write clues on pieces of papers, hide them and go hunting
Every now and then I come across signs where the English translation or explanation makes me smile and I feel I just have to take a photo to capture this cute side of living in Japan. Today I am sharing a recent addition to my collection. I can see that the environmental awareness in Japan
Living in Japan, I have previously talked about what I miss from Sweden. Dear family and friends, of course. Then there are the misty autumn mornings when the world is glittering in the sunrise after a frosty night. And the evening fog by the lake. Another one is proper bread – oh how I have been
What a summer it has been. Hot. Humid. And lots of experiences. Apart from what I have being writing about during the summer, we have been to a firework festival, visited a waterfall where my son got to try his hand on fishing for the first time (fishing for fish but also fishing for noodles
Our son is once a week having soroban lessons. A few weeks back his abacus teacher told him that he should learn to recognize his own name written in kanji, Chinese characters. The teacher is every week putting name tags on the desks indicating where the kids should sit, and since they change places from
Since spring our son has been practicing for this year’s piano recital held yesterday at a concert hall in Fukuoka. Three piano teachers had joined together to present a three-act recital featuring performances by all of their students, each playing music of their choice. In the middle act, the teachers themselves treated the audience to
One summer project I had been planning for my son and me this year was to create movies together. Since my son loves LEGO and Star Wars, I thought they would make an excellent theme for trying our hands on some stop motion movies. We started out easy, I downloaded a stop-motion app to the
I had been a little bit wary about long summer days too hot to be outside. Are my son and I going to drive each other up the walls when our normal active life is put on hold and we spend a lot of time together indoors at home? But as it has turned out,
I start where I finished the latest post – the best thing about Fukuoka in the summer is family evenings on the beach. It has been a very hot July and beginning of August, the temperature and humidity during the day sometimes feeling unbearable, but come late afternoon and the world shows a very different
Summer holidays – many of the most fond memories I have from my childhood are from warm summer days meeting people I loved doing things I enjoyed in places I came to adore. And now, I am so fortunate as to be able to see my son making precious memories for himself. Like Friday morning,
There is something special about summer – the heat, the breeze from the ocean, from the mountains, the smells. Walking barefoot. Today it was 35 degrees outside, humid. You have to be careful about not getting heatstroke this time of the year, so we try to keep awareness of the need for hydration and the