Skitsch

Just around the corner from the Bvlgari Hotel, Skitsch is a nice interior good / furniture shop in Milan. The store sells Senz umbrellas, a must-have if you live in a place where it's windy whenever it rains (which is true in Stockholm).

The Kungsholmen restaurant

I went to Kungsholmen, a famous, eclectic cuisine restaurant on the southern shore of the Kungholmen island in Stockholm, for dinner with Japanese economists. All of us are impressed by the quality of food. This is something. We are all from Tokyo, the world's capital of cuisine. Our taste buds are very picky.

Vietnamese beef salad, although it doesn't really taste like Vietnamese, is a pleasant experience with occasional sweetness of fruits in it. And veal entrecôte with chanterelles mushrooms is divine.

The restaurant looks like a luxury food court. Dinner tables are surrounded by food stalls of 7 different cuisine (including sushi and Swedish) in which you can see chefs cooking. But they are part of the decor. You don't have to go to these stalls to place an order. Waiters and waitresses come to your table to take your order.

As they do serve some Swedish dishes, the restaurant is recommended to anyone including visitors to Sweden.

National Cinnamon Bun Day

October 4th is the National Cinnamon Bun Day in Sweden. The cinnamon bun is the most common baked good, found in almost every cafe in Sweden.

And I don't like it at all.

A taste of drumstep

There's a new sub-genre of music emerging at the intersection of drum & bass and dubstep. It's called drumstep. Here's a taste of it. Do wait until 1 minute and 8 seconds pass, when the gist of drumstep reveals itself.


Added on 5 June 2011: this tune was awarded the best track of the year 2010 by Drum & Bass Awards 2011.

Du Chef

Yesterday I found a nice lunch place in Hammerby sjöstad. Du Chef, a tapas restaurant in the evening, serves Swedish lunch, charging 85 krona between 11:00 and 12:30 or 75 krona before 11am or after 12:30. (This pricing scheme reveals when Swedes have lunch most likely: quite early.)

As usual for lunch in Sweden, you pick a main dish (either meat, fish, or vegetarian), help yourself at a salad buffet, and slice bread on your own. Of course, an unlimited amount of coffee (or tea bags with warm, not hot, water) is included in the price.

But the main dish (skewered salmon with grönsaksris, which is supposed to be stir-fried rice with vegetable but tastes like vegetable pilaf, and skärgårdsröra, which seems to be one of the Swedish specialties, made of cream cheese, finely chopped anchovy or shrimps, chives, and finely chopped boiled eggs) tastes good. Certainly better than any of the lunch places in my workplace.

If you are around in the area of Sickla Udde around the lunch time, don't miss it.

Taking taxi in Stockholm on Friday afternoon

I went to Ikea to buy a desk for my apartment. On the way back, I took a cab.

It was around half past three in the afternoon. The highway was pretty busy. Swedes seem to leave office quite early on Friday. The taxi driver decided to get off from the highway and took an alternative route. The taxi fare meter kept the number rising and rising. What's the point of going to Ikea to buy a cheap, big furniture if bring it home by taxi costs more than the furniture?

Then the taxi driver, still on the way to my apartment, asked me if my company would pay the fare. I said no. Then he stopped the meter at 450 krona (48.6 euro), saying, "Friday afternoon is the bad time to take a cab. I didn't expect to take this long route."

It's perhaps something good about Stockholm.