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 […]
One evening when we were playing Monopoly for kids on the floor, there was a ping-pong on our intercom. Normally no one except delivery drivers ring on our intercom so we were wondering who might be calling late at night. On the screen we saw an elderly woman and through the speaker I heard her
A short anecdote from our little family. One busy morning this week as we were getting dressed preparing to go and wait for the kindergarten bus, my son took an interest in the top of my head. I was bending down, arranging his socks, when he suddenly said pappa, du har en ladugårdsplan på huvudet.
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
A short little post to celebrate a short little line of poetry found everywhere in Japan. 写真はイメージです。You can find “写真はイメージです。” written on a package of yoghurt, on menus at restaurants, in magazines and on advertisement boards just to name a small selection of places where you can enjoy the simple but beautiful sentence stating something
After months of waking up and still half asleep making a perfectly beautiful omelette for my son, I felt like quite the omelette master. Break an egg, add some milk and spices and stir while the frying pan with some rapeseed oil is getting warm, pour the mix into the pan, lower the temperature, wait
Every so often I find an opportunity to introduce some new aspects of life or some science to my son. And sometimes a piece of mythology finds its way into our life (of course I leave out any gruesome details, of which there usually are plenty). My son is very curious and often starts to
I always thought that the day had 24 hours, starting at 0 at midnight and ending 24 hours later the midnight after. At least all the time instruments I have seen have told me that, and when I want to set my alarm on my phone I can only choose between 0.00 and 23.59. Since
In Japan, the toilet is often found in a little room where nothing but the actual toilet can be found; I guess the space saving reason explains a big part of why often there is no separate basin to wash hands. The other reason I can think of is to save water – while normally
Our little family tries to surf in the rough sea of languages every day, the waves sometimes so violent that I fall of the surfing board and wash up on the shore all bruised. Especially so after a morning with my son at the playground. My wife and I speak Japanese and English, I speak
When I came to Japan the first few times I knew almost no Japanese and tried to pick up a few words by listening to other people talking. Standing in front of a traffic light I heard children saying 赤 赤 赤 青 (aka aka aka ao) – so I learned that red was aka and
Before meeting my wife, I always thought of Japan as a country where punctuality was deeply embedded in society, the image of trains always leaving and arriving on time being the prime example. Coming from Sweden where a train arriving on time is a bit of an oddity, together with my affinity for punctuality, Japan