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
The mountain Raizan and the Sennyoji temple lying on the mountainside – I feel strangely drawn to this place, especially so when it is raining. There is a calm, a stillness that is accentuated in the rain, and the colors, the sounds, the smells feel like they come from a magical place beyond this world.
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.
We have been closely following the successes and disappointments of our two home teems during this summer’s soccer World Cup. As it happened, Sweden and Japan were drafted to the same group and when they played their game last Friday, it was to determine which team would get the second place in the group and
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 have come to the next chapter in our Star Wars themed household – building a space ship. As it happened, we got a delivery in a big big cardboard box, so big that we felt that it would have been a great shame and waste not to play with it before folding it up
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
We have been living in Fukuoka for five years now, and for my part it is difficult to believe how quick it has been. Our son turned six last Friday, and thinking back, looking at old photos, it truly feels like only yesterday we came here just in time for his first birthday. Now he
The other afternoon, after snack time, my son suddenly turned to me and said that he would make a surprise. You can be in the kitchen dad, but don’t look, he said. Promise that you don’t look. So while I was preparing dinner I could see him in the corner of my eye working intensely
Being the only person my son hears speaking Swedish every day, of course it comes upon me to be the Swedish “teacher-in-charge” in his life. I have taken the task to my heart and every day I continue trying to make us work on different aspects of the Swedish language, but in a way that
It has become a yearly spring time tradition since moving to Fukuoka – forest adventure with our son’s cousins. But this year was different since it was the first time mummy could join. There is a company called Forest Adventure that has locations all over Japan where nature loving people can experience the thrill of balancing
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