Flat-hunting in Stockholm continues... (2)

Before going to work, I checked Bostad Direkt to see if any new apartment is listed.

I found two. Both in the city center. One is small but no specified date for contract termination. The other is slightly larger and quite expensive with 1 August as the termination date. I called both of them. No answer.

Around 5:30 pm, I checked Bostad Direkt again. A few more new apartments of my interest in suburbs. I called one which will be available from 1 July until 31 December. (So I would need to find a place to live in June as I have to leave my current apartment by the end of this month...) I was told there were already a few people coming to view the apartment. So I was waitlisted. Unbelievable. The ad was uploaded sometime during the day today. So I have to keep watching on Bostad Direkt even during my working hours?

I called another one which is available from 1 June to 31 August. I managed to get an appointment to view the flat on Wednesday morning. The idea is just to secure where to live during the summer and to continue searching for another apartment from Sepember or even from August, as the rent of this apartment is not very expensive.

Coming home and eating dinner, I checked Bostad Direkt again. One more apartment of my interest in a suburb available from 1 June to 31 June next year (but without washing machines, of course). No telephone number is uploaded as a contact. So I sent email.

I will keep you updated about my flat-hunting in Stockholm, to show you how difficult it is. Watch this space.

Flat-hunting in Stockholm continues...

I haven't found any apartment of my interest on Bostad Direkt since the last post. I guess it's about time to compromise.

Forget about using my own washing machine.

Forget about living in my favorite area of Stockholm.

Forget about staying in the same apartment for next 12 months.

As long as I can stay at least for next 4 months and I can go to work with just one change of trains, I should be happy.

This yields two apartments of my interest.

I called one place. It's already taken. The other one didn't pick up the phone.

Is the club music scene in Stockholm essentially dead?

Kalendarium.se is supposed to be the best source of information on what's on in terms of the club music scene in Stockholm.

Today I discovered the site is dead. I can't believe this.

Cherry blossoms in Stockholm today

Kungsträgården (top); Stockholm University Frescati campus (middle); Lumaparken (bottom)

Flat-hunting in Stockholm

The worst thing about living in Stockholm is to rent an apartment. I'm currently renting an apartment from a Swede who was abroad for a year. He's back in the city now, and about two months ago, he asked me to leave by the end of this month.

I really don't want to move out from my current neighborhood called Hammarby sjöstad. Apartments in the city center are expensive and small. Other Stockholm suburbs are unpleasantly purely residential (no street life at all). But the only apartment listing website for non-Swedish speakers, Bostad Direkt, shows only a couple of apartments in this area during the last 1 month and a half. When I called them up, they were already taken.

Accepting the reality that I have to leave this neighborhood, I started searching for apartments in other areas by struggling with a poorly-designed search function of Bostad Direkt (it's de facto a monopoly, no incentive to improve their website). I want to stay at a new apartment at least for a year. But most apartments are only available during the summer time when apparently Swedish owners go abroad for summer vacations. Even if it's available for 12 months or longer, they usually come without washing machines due to the stupid norm of using the laundry room collectively in an apartment building, which is really unacceptable to me (and no Swede sympathizes with me on this). 

I found a couple of places. One is actually a house in Nacka, an eastern suburb. I called the owner up and he told me the address of the place. I searched it on the online map. It was in the middle of a forest. I also searched it on the public transport journey planner. The nearest bus stop is 1km away. No way.

Another place is in Älvsjö (pronounced "elf-ho"). I went to see it yesterday. Älvsjö is located 10 minutes away from Stockholm Central station by the commuter train. Once I got off the train, I realized this area is a countryside. A small supermarket, a couple of depressing newsstands, a couple of depressing pizzeria, a Chinese restaurant serving sushi (which very often happens in Stockholm), and a barber. (This set of urban amenity is actually better than other suburbs.) Otherwise, they are houses with lots of green. No apartment building here. If you love nature, maybe this is an ideal place to live given the proximity to the city center. But I don't really appreciate nature.

The apartment was actually a set of rooms in one of these rural houses. The owner of the house seems to mis-classify it on Bostad Direkt. It's the basement with small windows and with worn-out furniture. I have to pass this opportunity. Otherwise I will kill myself.

Another place is in Bromma, a western suburb of Stockholm. This place is available only until the end of October. But I have to compromise. I can search again in autumn. I called the owner, and she asked me to call her back in the morning today. I did. She told me she would call me back in 10 minutes. one hour has passed by now. She didn't call me back. I checked Bostad Direct again. Her advertisement disappeared. Why doesn't she just tell me it's already taken?

Another place is in Vällingby (pronounced ve-ling-bu), another western suburb which is actually rather attractive the last time I visited there for the Massagotti cafe. I called the owner up. She didn't speak English at all.

Now I exhausted the list of apartments of my interest. I'm not sure if I find one until the end of this month.

Winter is finally over in Stockholm, or so I believe

No more days of temperature below 10 for all day.

A useful tool for those academics who use Mac OS X

These days, all the published academic papers are assigned the DOI identifier. If you type this number after "http://dx.doi.org/" in your browser address bar, you can directly access to the webpage from which you can download the paper.

It's annoying that you need to type "http://dx.doi.org/" every time, however. If you are an Apple user, there is an excellent solution. Check this out.

My typical Saturday morning issue in Stockholm

Japanese rice runs out. I won't be able to have dinner at home tonight. (I usually eat steamed Japanese rice for dinner at home). But I have to work today. What time does the Japanese food store close on Saturday? (Check its website.) Oh, 3 pm. But I don't think I'll be done with my work well before 3 pm today. What time does the store open today? Nine. Okay, but carrying a 5 kg bag of Japanese rice from the store to the workplace is not very pleasant. Oh, I also need to buy Japanese sake (which I use for cooking, not for drinking). What time does Systembolaget close? (Since alcohol sale in the private sector is prohibited, the Japanese food store does not sell Japanese sake. In case you haven't learned this yet, Systembolaget is the state alcohol sale monopoly in Sweden.) Damn, 3 pm. What time does it open? Ten. If I visit the Japanese food store first before 10 pm, then I have to carry the 5 kg bag of rice from there to Systembolaget... Then, carrying a 1.5 litter glass bottle of Japanese sake in addition to the 5 kg bag of rice from the store to the workplace is really unpleasant. Plus I will arrive at the workplace well after 10 am, which is not what I really want to do. I cannot do all these tomorrow, because both stores close all day on Sunday. By the way, I also have to think about where to have lunch today, because there is no place to eat over the weekend in the area where my workplace is located. And I still need to wear a coat for going out even in late April.

What should I do? Buying a car is an option, but I'd rather spend such an amount of money on the weekend breaks from Stockholm to visit London, Paris, Berlin, etc.


I didn't have this issue when I was studying for PhD in London, if I look back, because
(1) the Japanese food store was open until 8 pm, even on Saturday (and on Sunday),
(2) this Japanese food store also sells Japanese sake, and
(3) I can buy a rather tasty Indian curry ready meal at a supermarket near my school.

A Japanese hairstylist in Sweden

For every fashion-conscious Japanese person living in the West, the biggest headache is haircut. Even top hairstylists in the West cannot really handle with the thick, black hair of Japanese people. A hairstylist in Tokyo once told me about the lecture delivered by Tony & Guy's (or perhaps Vidal Sasoon, I forgot) top hairstylist visiting Japan. After the lecture, she and her fellow Japanese stylists talked to each other, saying, "If you do what he told us to Japanese people, the hair style would be horrible." You cannot imagine how many young Japanese girls cried after their first haircut experience in the West.

I was lucky enough to meet Yumiko-san while I was in London. Here in Stockholm, I haven't been lucky enough to find my favorite hairstylist. Being Japanese is not enough. Being Japanese and stylish is the key.

Now in Göteborg, Sweden's second biggest city, a Japanese hair dresser opened her salon this month. Judging from the web design and the self-introduction emphasizing her experience in Tokyo, London, and New York, she appears to be the one I've long been looking for ever since I moved to Sweden.

But why Göteborg, not Stockholm?

I guess I will soon make a train trip to the difficult-to-guess-its-pronunciation second biggest city of Sweden (its English name is Gottenburg, by the way) to have my hair cut by her. I wanted to visit the city pronounced like "yo-tebory" anyway, to put Stockholm in perspective.

Icelandic volcano ash

Academics in Europe are also victims of Icelandic volcano ash. Our workplace was supposed to be hosting a couple of leading economists from the US from today until early next week, but they canceled the visit to Stockholm. My colleague visiting from Italy told me his home university has had lots of cancellation of seminar talks as speakers cannot fly to Italy. Another colleague is currently stranded in East Asia where he presented his research.

Inviting researchers from universities abroad is an essential part of academic life, to keep up with the latest advances in research. The volcano in Iceland interrupts us from doing this.

EU Green City award winning Stockholm

Here's a news article on how environmentally friendly Stockholm is. I'm always surprised how the city manages to combine urban amenity with nature seamlessly. But there is a downside to it. Rent regulation certainly discourages the building of new apartments which potentially harms environment. Nature-loving people mean less demand for cutting-edge urban amenity.

There is always a trade-off. The key is what you value the most.

Saturday in Stockholm

What I don't like about Stockholm is Saturday.

I had to work today. I went to my workplace, and left by 5:30 pm. I needed to buy a loaf of bread at Gateau. Bread is in general not very good in Stockholm, and outside the city center there are essentially no bakery. It's impossible to walk a bit in your neighborhood to buy a tasty loaf. Gateau's grand blanc is one of my few favorite loaves. But I have to visit Gallerian, a shopping center at the heart of Stockholm.

By the time I arrived, it was past 6 pm. Two girls were busy closing down the shop. I saw three leftover grand blanc loaves in the showcase. But they just told me, "We are closed."

If you live in Stockholm, working on Saturday just makes you feel more miserable.

Small-sized retail stores close at 4 pm. The state alcohol monopoly seller Systembolaget even closes at 3 pm (to discourage alcohol consumption). Even the department stores NK and PUB close at 6 pm. As far as I know, the shop opens until the latest is Åhlens City, which closes at 7 pm. What's worse, those small-sized stores (including my favorite Japanese food stores) and, of course, Systembolaget close all day on Sunday. If you need to do shopping, you have to do it on Saturday by waking up early in the morning.

This is one example of why the harder you work, the harder your life gets in Stockholm. Working too hard on weekdays makes Saturday the only day for shopping, but if you work too hard, you don't want to wake up early on Saturday, do you? If you work hard over weekdays, you don't have time to plan ahead whether to shop on Saturday. When you realize you need to buy something on Saturday, it's pretty much too late.

What's worse, it's likely that you have to do laundry over the weekend in a pre-booked time slot (see this entry on doing laundry in Sweden), because booking the laundry room in the evening on a weekday is pretty much impossible and you can't do laundry in the morning or afternoon on a weekday if you work hard.

So I've stopped working on Saturday since long before. Today was an exception, and that reminded me of how stressful life in Stockholm can be for a person in American or East Asian style.

The Local, Sweden's only English newspaper

I don't know why I feel depressed every time I read Sweden's only English newspaper, The Local. Today's top news reports about 40 percent of apartments in Stockholm are sublet illegally. As I now need to move out of the current sublet apartment and find it difficult to find a desirable one to move in, it just makes me depressed. (For the stupidity of rental apartment market in Sweden, see my previous post.)

Then this article reports a proposal of banning cash in small retail stores so that shopkeepers won't face a threat of robbery. Why does the Swedish authority love banning everything such as paying in cash to the bus driver (which has already been enacted, leaving the bus travel inconvenient to tourists), the sale of alcohol in the private sector (because Swedes drink too much), electric socket converters (because Americans in Sweden used it without knowing the difference in voltage between Europe and America, resulting in explosion), drinking bottled mineral water for employees in the municipal government of Göteborg, Sweden's second largest city (because tap water in Sweden tastes good and bottled mineral water is a waste of resources)?

Then The Local's guide to moving in Sweden begins with how to recycle what you want to throw away when you are moving. A very noble-minded way of starting the preparation of the moving... But the immediate concern for any mover is something else, isn't it?

The remaining articles talk about a benefit fraud (Sweden is a welfare state), child sexual abuse, and a serial killer incident.

But The Local is the only source of information on what's going on in Sweden for those foreigners who do not speak Swedish. I still have to read it every morning...

Restaurant J

To be fair to the Stockholm dining scene, I should write something here on this blog when I do encounter good foods.

With my colleagues, I have an Easter dinner at Restaurant J tonight. Although the Easter menu itself doesn't sound very tantalizing (some of us indeed went for the usual menu instead), the actual dishes are very good.

According to the English menu, the starter is "smoked salmon served with spring salad and egg". This doesn't sound very tempting. But the Swedish menu says a bit more: varmrökt lax på vårsallad med kokt ägg, which means hot-smoked (not cold-smoked) salmon on spring salad with boiled egg (not just egg). The actual dish is even more. The hot-smoked salmon is actually a chunk (rather than slices) of smoked salmon fillet with a pleasant smell of smoke. Some of the leaves in spring salad taste earthy in a good way, making me feel spring (which hasn't come yet in Stockholm). And the creamy greenish dressing sauce (which is not mentioned in the menu at all) is properly done. I'm pleasantly surprised.

Then the main dish is "herb and lemon filled roast lamb served with garlic sauce, vegetables ragout and new potatoes" in the English menu. The Swedish menu says the garlic sauce is actually roasted garlic sauce. This sounds better, because when roasted, garlic tastes different, and raw garlic sauce reminds me of the one on kebab meal at one of the lunch places at my workplace (which is of course pretty bad). And the lamb and vegetables ragout that is actually served is more sophisticated than I expected. In other words, it tastes very good. The lamb is served in a French style rather than in an English style, and the vegetable ragout is not a collection of dices of vegetables (which I don't really like because of the rough texture) but white asparaguses or something (I'm not really sure what it is, but if it tastes fine, it's fine). And new potatoes. Even though I'm fed up with potatoes that always come with the main dish in Sweden, eating new potatoes is a very refreshing experience. I love them.

The dessert is citronfromage in Swedish. Lemon cheese? No, in Swedish, citronfromage means lemon mousse for whatever reason. And, very unusually for even good restaurants in Stockholm, this dessert is great, if not superb. The texture is right. The degree of sourness is right. Not too sweet and the right amount.

I learn one thing. It is essential to learn Swedish words for restaurant menus, because the English version (if available) doesn't precisely translate the original menu, which may make your choice wrong. If I didn't know that the smoked salmon was not the usual smoked salmon or that garlic sauce is actually roasted garlic sauce, I would have gone for other dishes. (Even the Swedish version of the menu of Restaurant J says too little about the dish, though.)

And that's what I have been doing: learning Swedish words often used in the menu. I browse the menu of a good restaurant in Stockholm online and translate each term by using not only tyda.se (the online Swedish-English dictionary) but also the Swedish wikipedia (and then clicking the link to the English version for the same item) and Google. Google helps me to find out a recipe for a particular dish in Swedish, and then I can translate it with Google Translate to see what kind of dish a particular Swedish term refers to.

The result is this. I'm still learning, but it seems to start paying off.

Oh, the price of the Easter 3 course meal is 360 krona (about 36 euro). It's not cheap, but this is the price to motivate Swedish chefs to cook properly.

Sweden's Easter

The traditional Easter week in Sweden lasts from Thursday to Monday, and kicks off with a trick or treat-like candy hunt. Children dress up as påskkärringar (Easter witches) with long skirts, headscarves, painted red cheeks and freckles and go from house to house wishing people happy Easter. They get sweets in return for a drawing or song. Legend has it that the witches fly to Blåkulla (Blue mountain) the same night to meet the devil. (From SWEDEN.SE, the official gateway to Sweden)

I didn't know this even though this is the third Easter in Sweden. For the past two years, I lived in a foreign student colony hard to be accessed from anywhere in Stockholm (so there's no Swedish child around at all).

Children just showed up at my apartment today. As I hate candies, I don't have any. When I tried to give them some cookies (from Japan) as a compromise, they didn't accept them and went away.

Swedish children are very strict to the rule.

And perhaps the best example of the fact that I'm not part of the Swedish society at all (sigh).

Security alert to Hotmail users

It seems some Hotmail email accounts were recently hijacked by someone who wants to promote www.happyhu.com as an iPhone 3G vendor. I keep receiving an email from my former landlord in London (whom I haven't been in contact for long) with the following content:

Hey How are you these days? I bought one apple iphone 3gs black from this website www.happyhu.com ..

It's obvious that this is a spam. But it's hard to mark it as a spam, because all the messages from this person (whom you do know) will then be marked as spam.

I google this message content, and I found this person and this person facing the same problem.

Social Democracy

The concept of social democracy, quite popular in Sweden (some people often sing the anthem of social democracy in a party occasion), is something very unfamiliar to me. I know what it means. It just doesn't sound natural to me. It sounds very foreign to me. I now understand why.

After the Second World War, the Japanese politics was dominated by the Liberal Democratic Party, a conservative, right-wing party. The main opposition party was the Japan Socialist Party. This party, unlike those social democratic parties in Europe, did not abandon communism. While social democratic parties in Europe supported the US in the Vietnam War, the Japan Socialist Party criticized the US. The party was always close to Soviet Union, mainland China, and Eastern European countries during the Cold War.

In a nutshell, the political party who was supposed to bring the idea of social democracy to Japan failed to do it by sticking to the ideal of achieving socialism via violent revolution.

As a result, the concept of social democracy is quite foreign to Japanese people including myself. If you have a Japanese friend, ask him or her what social democracy is. I bet you won't get any answer.

And that's one of the reasons I'm so perplexed by Sweden where the social democratic party had been in power for a long time.

It seems I should learn the history of social democracy in Europe.

Götgatan Stories

Yet another uninspiring cafe in Stockholm.

As always, the decor is great. Located on the ground floor of the Skrapan shopping center, Götgatan Stories has got a high-ceiling with ceiling to floor glass windows facing the busy Götgatan street. Coffee cups are colored either with chocolate brown or with maya blue.

And as always, coffee and food is disappointing. Machiato tastes okay but with that weird sourness that always comes with coffee in Sweden. The food that I order is toast with chili prawns and saffron aioli (about 7.8 euro). The term chili in the menu in Stockholm usually suggests something wrong. But I feel a bit adventurous today. And I get disappointed. First few bites are all right. It's interesting. But it's quite large a portion, served with, for some reason, balsamic vinegar that doesn't really match the whole concept of this toast, which is not really crispy. Accompanying salad includes the disgustingly-colored red beets (a very typical salad ingredient in Sweden) and, for some reason, pickled Chinese cabbage which is so out of place. As is often the case in "creative" dishes in Stockholm, it's colourful (red beets, saffron yellow, and balsamic brown) without thinking much about the right combination of tastes.

As I start feeling ill (it's oily in addition to strange tastes), I decide not to finish eating the dish even though I rarely do so.

Fast food in Stockholm

The latest issue (Issue 32) of Monocle magazine touches on the subject of fast food in Stockholm. It introduces three decent fast food joints in Sweden's capital: La Neta (for authentic Mexican tacos), Hantverkargatan 14 (quality deli), and Steam (for dumplings to take away). Talking about La Neta, they say, "It brings some much-needed colour to the city's fast food scene... Swedes are the second-biggest consumers of TexMex in Europe after Norway, so no wonder it's always packed."

Not again. Good places are always packed in this city... I'm discouraged to visit La Neta for lunch today.

I checked the locations of these three places. They are all out of my usual sphere of activity. Maybe I live and work in wrong parts of Stockholm...

Souperb

Souperb is a ready-meal provider in Sweden. As its name suggests, it tries to offer superb soup. But they also produce some non-soup ready meals.

Last Saturday, I had to go to office to get some work done. On Saturdays, there are no restaurants open around my workplace. I had to buy some ready meal at a kiosk next to the nearest station, even though I know ready meals in Sweden taste pretty bad.

I happened to find Souperb's Wallenbergare med Potatismos, which looked rather nice. And it tasted better than I expected, even though green peas got some wrong taste for some reason.

Slightly encouraged by this experience, today I finally tried one of Souperb's offers that I've always avoided ever since I moved to Sweden: Sweet Beef Tokyo. (Remember I am from Tokyo.) I looked at it, and I had to leave the kiosk once, because it didn't look really right. But I didn't want to end up with meatballs again, which is the only decent lunch dish around my workplace. I took courage to buy one and had it for lunch today.

It's worse than I expected. Remember my expectation wasn't that high. I've never had something like this in Tokyo. One thing that's completely wrong is red chili. We Japanese never ever put chili into what Souperb calls sweet beef. Plus, umami is completely absent. (If you don't know what umami is, look it up on Wikipedia.)

Here's the real recipe for what Souperb calls sweet beef. It seems the sources of the trouble are finely chopped onions and leeks (so they lose the texture; in Japan, onions and leeks are only sliced for this dish so you can enjoy the soft but still crunchy texture) and, most importantly, the failure to simmer beef in Japanese sake or white wine and to add mirin to the sweet soy sauce. Japanese sake or mirin is hard to obtain in Sweden. But why don't they even use white wine? Perhaps they prefer drinking it.

Using the name of Tokyo for this ready meal is derogatory to the superb dining culture of Japan's capital. (I'm serious.)

Souperb also offers Hot Chicken Bangkok, but I wouldn't try, especially because Thai foods in Stockholm, which is quite popular, almost always get something wrong.

2012

According to Asahi.com (a Japanese newspaper's website), you'll be arrested if you watch the film 2012 on DVD in North Korea.

Year 2012 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il-Song, the former president and founder of the People's Democratic Republic of Korea (the official name of North Korea). The Republic is "thus" officially supposed to become a superpower in 2012. Since the film depicts 2012 as the year of a series of natural disasters leading to the verge of human extinction, it's unacceptable for Kim Jong-Il, the current president and son of Kim Il-Song.

This is a county where the minister in charge of currency denomination was recently executed for his policy failure.

A Quote of Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe

Some years ago at an international writers’ meeting in Sweden, a Swedish writer and journalist said to a small group of us Africans present: “You fellows are lucky. Your governments put you in prison. Here in Sweden nobody pays any attention to us no matter what we write.” We apologized profusely to him for his misfortune and our undeserved luck!

... which is quoted from Chris Blattman's blog

mjölkchoklad-pannacotta med blodapelsin

Do you think it's a good idea to mix the tastes of milk chocolate and bloody orange? I don't think so, but a pâtissier at my neighborhood organic supermarket does when he or she makes panna cotta. I'm not very impressed. Each portion (milk chocolate panna cotta and bloody orange jelly, respectively) tastes good. But when they both are put into my mouth, it tastes awkward. Bloody orange may work well with the bitterness of dark chocolate, but not with the sweetness of milk chocolate.

The Wikipedia entry on Swedish cuisine characterizes it as "contrasting flavours; such as the traditional dish of meatballs and gravy with tart, pungent lingonberry jam (slightly similar in taste to cranberry sauce)." It's nothing wrong with contrasting flavours. It could work like magic. But not always, of course. And, for some reason, Swedish choices of contrasting flavours rarely result in magic to my taste...

We won!

As far as I remember, this is perhaps the first time for Japan to win against the coalition of US and European countries in international negotiation.

I'm sorry, but we love fatty tuna. In the West, salmon is the main fish for sushi, but it is tuna in Japan. Imagine, say, Japan claimed for banning the export of salmon because of overfishing. Would you accept that?

Continental Europe tends to believe in paternalistic government intervention like banning a certain kind of economic activities. Why don't they believe in the responsible behavior of private agents? Japanese fishers have been observing the quota for fishing tuna.

Mankiw's advice for choosing a graduate program

5. Is the location of the school a fun place to live?  Grad school is a long haul, typically 4 to 6 years, which is a significant fraction of your life.  Being a PhD student is hard work, but it should not be a miserable existence.

6. Is the university overall a good place?  It is always more fun being part of a great institution.  Even if the economics department is perfect, if it is an island in a sea of mediocrity, being there will be less satisfying.

Quoted from Greg Mankiw's Blog (March 14, 2010)

Berghain

The Berghain nightclub, voted as the world's best nightclub by DJ Mag last year, opens at midnight on Sunday and close on the Sunday evening. Unlike usual nightclubs, therefore, you can just hop in on the Sunday afternoon (which I did). And the venue, a former power station, is kind of post-industrial chic; concrete columns and walls with steel interior, somehow matching with techno music's squeaky sound. The main dance floor has a very high ceiling. And it provides the underground and alternative atmosphere although it's not dangerous: I saw gay men couples wearing only bikini pants and kissing deep. Even though smoking in the indoor public space (like restaurants and bars) is prohibited in Germany, many people smoke inside. Some compartments are completely dark: you never know what people do inside. And many good-looking girls. :) If you happen to have a chance to visit Berlin over a weekend, visit this place. It's certainly one of the best nightclubs in the world.

Fabio's BBC Radio 1 Show This Weekend

You gotta listen to this weekend's BBC Radio 1 Drum and Bass Show hosted by Fabio before it becomes unavailable online at the end of this Saturday. Many good drum and bass tunes are played, and the recorded live performance by DJ Marky alongside MC Tali is just awesome. Once you listen to this, you'll know why I love drum and bass music.

Click here and then click LISTEN NOW to start the quality sound streaming of the programme.

Cafes in Stockholm

I planned to write something good about Stockholm today. Unfortunately, the Swedish capital made me unhappy again today. So I have to write something negative about Stockholm (again).

After two years and a half have passed since I moved here, I still haven't found my favorite cafe in this city. There are several that came close to the throne, but there's always something wrong with them.

Mocco in Östermalm, the poshest area of Stockholm, serves decent, if not excellent, toast called Barcelona and offers high-ceiling, minimalistic and stylish decor to a good mixture of trend-conscious people. But their coffee is absolutely disgusting, and it sometimes gets very crowded and noisy.

Caffe Nero in Vasastan serves coffee that's okay, if not excellent, and delicious panini, if a bit too oily. Tatao Ando-ish concrete-surfaced counters and relaxing black-leather chairs at the back of the cafe are nice. Their pasta is not impressive, though. And it gets packed during lunchtime.

Cafe Spoon in Hammerby sjöstad, my neighborhood, offers wooden, minimalist interior with the view of waterway from its patio. It serves okay foods with Caffe Monteriva (Swedish espresso brand)'s coffee which is too sour to me.

Kaffebar in Södermalm serves an excellent toast topped with Västerbotten cheese (a Swedish specialty). But, with only a few seats in a large space, they are aiming to be an Italian coffee bar (meaning you are supposed to gulp a shot of espresso quick while you are standing) and they also serve Caffe Monteriva (Swedish espresso brand)'s coffee which is too sour to me.

Sosta Espresso Bar, supposedly serving the best espresso in the city, does serve good coffee, but they don't have any seats. Their focaccia is not particularly fantastic.

Blå Lotus, which I visited last Saturday, is very nicely presented with three rooms in different themes: the largest green room at the entrance, the blue room with gold-rimmed mirrors on the wall, and the red room with Chinese lamps and decoration. Their signature(?) sandwich cake Shiva looks perfect with melting cheese, roasted tomatoes, garlic puree... But something is missing in its taste. (Perhaps butter?) As I sensed an inspiration from India in this place, I ordered chai rather than coffee. It was great that they didn't serve a cup of warm water with a chai teabag. But they pour foamed milk onto spice-infused black tea that's kept on a hot plate. Chai should be made by boiling milk, not water, with tea leaves and spice, shouldn't it? The mixture of spice is good, though. However, the place is very busy in the Saturday afternoon. I waited 15 minutes to place an order at the counter, and then sat on a small table for one person at the narrow corner of the blue room.

So the quest for my favorite cafe in Stockholm still continues. And today I went to Gildas rum, the best cafe in Stockholm according to Spotted by Locals. It was half past three in the Saturday afternoon. So I imagined the place wouldn't be too crowded. I was wrong. I couldn't find any chairs to sit down.

I also visited other cafes in the same area known as Sofo, the supposedly hippest area of Stockholm: Svart Kaffe, which plays dubstep (for the first time I hear that in Stockholm), and Cafe Oye, the Chilean cafe. Both places are packed with no seat left. Both of them are also tiny places. Even if I get seated, I wouldn't feel very comfortable.

The problem is not the absence of good cafes in this city, it seems. There appear to be good ones. But those good places are easily packed either because everyone follows the suit once they hear a good reputation or because there are very few good cafes in the first place. In other words, there is no hidden-gem kind of cafe in this city. Good places are known to everybody. Spacious cafes tend to serve bad foods and bad coffee for some reason. Many cafes are stylishly decorated, but the appearance does not reflect the quality of food and coffee at all in this city.

The only way to enjoy those small, (hopefully) decent cafes is to wake up early over the weekend, which I hate to do, especially during the winter when going out is such a hassle: making sure I wear clothes warm enough and struggling to walk either on the uneven surface of snow or on the slippery ice. My legs hurt after 30 minutes of walking on the snow as I'm not grown up in snowy winter. (Not many people in Europe know it rarely snows in Tokyo, my hometown, by the way. If you look at the globe, it's obvious, however. Tokyo is about as north as Athens.)

And my final complaint is there is no proper tea salon as I prefer black tea to coffee. No one in Stockholm seems to know you need absolutely boiling water to infuse black tea properly. And black tea per se is not very popular here; people drink Earl Grey or other flavored tea. Flavored tea usually uses the low quality tea leaves, and I hate it.

Drum and Bass in Sweden

As I keep saying on this blog, I'm a big fan of drum and bass. I'm also interested in its cousin dubstep. Since England is the epicenter of both types of music, whether or not I can satisfy this musical interest of mine in Sweden depends on whether Swedish promoters invite great DJs from there. In Sweden, a promoter called Traffic organizes drum and bass events from time to time. For dubstep, AllOutDubstep is, as far as I know, the only promoter.

They organize events in Stockholm and in Malmö, the third largest city of Sweden in the south (across the water from the Danish capital Copenhagen). (The letter ö reads somewhere between e and o.) Twice in a row, the event in Malmö looks very interesting to me. Last December, Malmö saw DJ Hype, one of the biggest DJs in the drum & bass scene whose astonishing scratching technique always makes me dance. This weekend, AllOutDubstep invites Breakage, perhaps one of the most important producers in the dubstep scene right now, to Malmö. A couple of his drum and bass tunes that I heard on Fabio's BBC Radio 1 show are incredible.

And what I don't understand is this.

Breakage won't come to Stockholm, neither did DJ Hype. 

Are DJ Hype and Breakage too dangerous to homogeneously tidy-clad people in Stockholm? Come on.

Maybe it's not Sweden but Stockholm that makes my life difficult.

Oh, there is another specific incident about Stockholm that makes me unhappy. A violinist friend of mine has been touring with an Ausie singer as a supporting musician. This singer comes to Stockholm this April, but my friend won't come because the stage in Stockholm is too small to have a quartet performing live. So I won't be able to see this friend in Stockholm.

These are very specific reasons to dislike Stockholm, but they mean a lot to me. I'm just incompatible with this beautiful, safe, and usually regarded as livable, capital of Sweden.

Foods in Sweden

It seems it's not only me who have some trouble with foods in Sweden.

Here's an experience of an American girl.

Here's an experience of an Irish man.

Cool Japan in Paris

What amazes me during my weekend stay in Paris is the ubiquitous presence of Japan. So many Japanese restaurants are scattered around the city. Colette, the "concept store" that sells everything that's cool, exhibits casual fashion brands from Tokyo, including Graniph (my favorite t-shirt brand). It also sells laptop bags and mobile phone cases decorated by Tokyo landscape along with the ones of London and New York. I discover a Paris branch of Japanese socks brand Tabio in fashionable Marais district. Uniqlo, Japan's answer to H&M and Zara, has also opened a branch here. And Japanese patissier Sadaharu Aoki has opened two little stores on the Left Bank, where I bought Pomme Caramel tea (I usually don't drink flavoured black tea, but this one as well as Mariage Freres Marco Polo, which I also bought during my stay in Paris, does make my taste bud tantalized).

Japanese people in Tokyo, especially girls, still adore Paris and France. Parisians now adore Tokyo and Japan.

Colette's website, by the way, streams cool music 24 hours. Check it out.

(This is the last blog post on the weekend trip to Paris in 2010. Click here to the first post.)

Tips for flying to Paris by Ryanair

1. In the baggage claim area of Paris-Beauvais Airport, you can buy tickets for coach services to Paris city center. But they only accept cash. Make sure you have an enough amount of Euro in cash before you board the Ryanair aircraft in your home airport.

2. Make sure you buy a return ticket (28 euro). There is no discount by buying a return rather than a single (14 euro), but you will avoid the long queue to buy a coach ticket when you return to the airport. You don't want to waste your precious time of being in Paris, by waiting to buy a coach ticket.

3. Once you exit the baggage claim area, go straight out of the airport building and walk to the right along the building. The coach to Paris departs from there. The airport map is available on page 8 of the PDF file that you can download from the airport website after clicking Timetable > Passenger's Guide.

4. In 75 minutes, the coach arrives at the bus parking lot near Porte Maillot station, served by Metro Line number 1 (the red line on the Paris Metro Map). Although there is a series of signage that leads you to the east entrance of the station, the west entrance of the station is closer. Head for the large M sign to the right.

5. Paris-Beauvais airport is packed on the Sunday evening when European visitors to Paris all go home by Ryanair and other low-cost airlines. If you need to check-in your luggage, make sure you arrive early.

6. Toilets in Paris-Beauvais airport are badly maintained. The floor is dirty. There's no hook for coats inside the cubicles. If you do need to change your clothes at this airport (say, because you are heading back to icy-cold Nordic countries in winter), use the disabled toilet at the check-in counter side of the airport.

7. Restaurants in Paris-Beauvais airport are not impressive. Try to have your last meal in Paris before you get on the coach.

8. The waiting lounge for boarding passengers is rather small with only a few seats despite a large number of passengers using this airport. Be prepared to keep standing for a while until you board the aircraft.

9. If the budget allows you to do so, avoid flying with Ryanair to Paris. Flying home via Paris-Beauvais airport is such a hassle. And using up your precious time as much as 150 minutes for taking a coach to Paris is a real waste of time, because the French capital makes you stay for as long as possible.

(This is the second-to-last blog post on the weekend trip to Paris in 2010. Click here to the final post.)

Hotel Review: Hotel Aviatic

I stayed at a single "tradition room" on the 5th floor at Hotel Aviatic from 20 to 21 February, 2010. The room rate was 120 euro per night.

The Good:
Within a walking distance to Gare Montparnasse from which the train to Chartres (famous for the gothic cathedral) departs. Also close to Montparnasse Bienvenue Metro station (Lines 4, 6, 12, and 13).

The staff at the reception is friendly and professional.

The decor with an influence of Oriental motifs.

The Bad:
The hotel looks not as great as its website photo suggests.

As the hotel is only 30 seconds away from a busy street (Boulevard du Montparnasse), the bedroom can be noisy at night.

They charge the wireless internet access (6 euro for 24 hours).

The Ugly:
Breakfast. They charge as much as 14 euro, and what they serve is a cup of coffee made by the self-service coffee maker machine, yogurt bought in a local supermarket, and cold continental breakfast.

The Verdict:
Unless you stay in Paris for one night before going somewhere else in France from Gare Montparnasse, it's not really the place to stay in the French capital.

(This is the seventh blog post on the weekend trip to Paris in 2010. Click here to the next post.)

The Louvre

It was on Tuesday when I previously visited Paris. The Louvre was thus closed. So this is the first time to visit the world's most famous museum.

Following the piece of advice by Time Out City Guide Paris, I enter the Louvre from the Cour des Lions entrance (at the south-west corner of the Louvre building) to avoid the queue for buying an entrance ticket. This allows me to enter immediately. The cost of doing this, however, is to get lost.

I've never been to any museum that's so hard to navigate. I want to follow a self-guided tour suggested by the Louvre website. But this document assumes that a visitor enters the Louvre from the Pyramid. It takes a while to arrive at the room of Mona Lisa.

And the way Mona Lisa is displayed is a huge disappointment. Even though the painting is rather small, visitors are not allowed to get close to it. You can only gaze at it from at least five meters. And there are tons of people taking picture of it. I wanted to see why this painting has got so famous. But with such a setting for viewing the work, I cannot.

Forget about Mona Lisa and turn around. There is an excellent painting entitled The Wedding Feast at Cana by Veronese, which is more entertaining than Mona Lisa.

This self-guided tour includes the famous painting of Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, the one that appears in perhaps every country's European history textbook. It's still not clear to me why the woman representing the concept of Liberty has to be topless. Perhaps it was the way to promote liberty to every man. When new technology appears, it's always porn that contributes to its eventual prevalence. Think about the Internet. Porn websites certainly contributed to the initial expansion of Internet users.

After museum fatigue kicks in, I have late lunch at the museum restaurant near the main entrance. Since it's already 3 pm, most warm dishes are run out even though they display those dishes. Every customer asks the lady serving food which food is available. She's apparently in bad mood. And the food is not very pleasant. These days, museums reinvent themselves so they often serve good food as well as nicely decorated cafes and interesting museum shops. But the Louvre, with its horrible direction signs, seems to be still part of the old generation of museums.

(This is the sixth blog post on the weekend trip to Paris in 2010. Click here to the next post.)

Viewed from beneath

Do you know what this is?

No? Okay, let me change the angle slightly.

You still have no idea? Okay, see this.

Now you should know what this is.

When viewed from beneath, the Effel Tower is still beautiful. The last time I was in Paris, I just watched it from Palais de Chaillot across the Seine. The beauty of perfect symmetry in a metropolis (which is usually associated with chaotic landscape) impressed me greatly. This time, I wanted to see the Tower more closely.

And I'm impressed again. What amazes me is the design of the tower that allows visitors to see it from directly beneath it. As the elevators climb up the tower along the four legs, there is vast open space below the tower, decorated by eight iron arches (two in parallel in each side). Not only does this allow the view of Palais de Chaillot or of Ecole Militaire to be seen below the arch when the tower is viewed from a distance, it also allows visitors to look up in awe while they are standing directly beneath it. As far as I remember, there is no other soaring tower in the world that has an open space beneath it. Although French people (and Europeans in general) are not a big fan of high-rise buildings (in stark contrast to Americans and East Asians), they accept the Eiffel Tower. I now understand why.

(This is the fifth blog post on the weekend trip to Paris. Click here to the next post.)

Le Café du Marché

As the hotel's breakfast doesn't look great, I do intensive research in Time Out City Guide Paris and decide to visit this cafe as a breakfast place.

A short walk from Ecole Militaire metro station (Line 8) takes me to Le Cafe du Marche at 38 Rue de Cler. It's a laid-back neighborhood restaurant of Paris. I have a pleasant breakfast here.

As I feel slightly ill, I order a glass of tomato juice. They serve it with celery salt. I use it for salad that comes with a tasty cheese omelette. It works like magic.

(This is the fourth blog post on the weekend trip to Paris in 2010. Click here to the next post.)

Le Petit Marche in 2010

For a dinner with a bag designer friend of mine living in Paris, I picked Le Petit Marche, the restaurant that I liked during my previous visit.

He booked a table from 8 pm though I arrived earlier than that. I found a nice tea salon across the street, but it was actually closed at 7 pm. This tea salon named Le Cafe Chinois looks interesting. I'll visit this place next time I visit Paris.

Four years on, the restaurant now has at least one person who speaks English although he has a hard time explaining the menu to non-French speaking dinners at a table next to us.

The food is unfortunately not as good as I expected. Tartar is too sour. Creme brulee tastes good, but the portion is too large. Perhaps I didn't make the right choice from the menu. Although the friend helped me translate each dish, I wasn't really sure which dish would fit my taste the best.

But I enjoy talking to my friend whom I met for the first time in almost four years.

The place gets packed while we are eating. Even though the restaurant is located at the quiet street corner, there is a queue after 9 pm. According to the friend, this restaurant is very popular with more creative types.

A short walk from here takes us to a series of bars in lively Marais district. We end up in an Italian cafe serving a pot of Mariage Freres black tea with wasabi powder coated nuts. :)

(This is the third blog post on the weekend trip to Paris in 2010. Click here to the next post.)

Ministry of Culture and Communication of France

On the way from Cafe Etienne Marcel to Colette, I happen to encounter the strange-looking building at the corner of Rue Croix des Petits Champs and Rue Saint Honore.

(viewed from Rue Croix des Petits Champs)

I am approaching from the back side. I wonder what this building is for, and I first feel surprised and then find it making sense after learning that it is for the Ministry of Culture and Communication of France.

The internet search reveals that architects named Francis Soler and Frédéric Druot designed this government building. Here is the architect's own account of how they designed it.

(viewed from Rue Saint Honore)

(This is the second blog post on the weekend trip to Paris in 2010. Click here to the next entry.)

Cafe Etienne Marcel

The first thing to do during the weekend stay in Paris is to have a quality lunch. Flying from Stockholm with Ryanair on the Saturday morning does not allow me to eat something until 3 pm (except a piece of croissant at the airport). As I keep suffering from uninspiring lunches in Stockholm, I have to go to a place that serves a quality lunch.

Picked out from the list of "sexy" places in Paris featured in a Japanese magazine Invitation (the July 2008 issue) is this cafe:

I wish Stockholm had this kind of cafe. Then I would frequent it over weekends.

Cafe Etienne Marcel is open everyday from 7 am to 2 am, serving food all day. The cafe is full of contemporary art-ish furniture. It's not really packed on the Saturday late afternoon, which allows me to relax. And most importantly they serve quality food. A simple dish of omelettes (9 euro) comes with fresh green leaves alongside tasty salad dressing. It costs 9 euro with a basket of unpreteniously tasty bread included. Cafe latte also tastes good.

If it were in Stockholm, the cafe would be packed even on the late afternoon, it would close by 6 pm over the weekends, green leaves would be half rotten, salad dressing would have got its taste wrong, bread would taste uninspiring, and coffee would taste unpleasantly sour.

Well, perhaps I'm insulting the cafe culture of Paris if I compare it with that in Stockholm...

(This is the first blog entry on my weekend trip to Paris in 2010. Click here to the next entry.)

Thai royal family

According to Fabio on his BBC Radio 1 show broadcast last night, the princess of Thailand loves drum & bass, my favorite music genre.

The prince of Thailand is known to be a big fan of X Japan, my favorite rock group from Japan.

If I were invited to a Thai royal family banquet, I would have a great time, it seems.

One thing that I don't like about Stockholm

Today I'm reminded of one reason for why Stockholm has made my life difficult.

When I work hard, I don't feel like cooking on my own. However, there is essentially no decent, budget quick eatery in Stockholm. All those sushi places are no-nos to me because they are not Japanese sushi but Swedish sushi. (In case you don't know, Stockholm has a sushi restaurant literally at every street corner; and they tend to fall in the budget category for some reason.) Good restaurants are all pricey and not the kind of place to visit alone. Supermarkets do not help because they sell mediocre ready meals. The ICA supermarket's "Bombay curry" ready meal is pretty bad, for example. Swedes do not really understand the concept of curry. It's not just the mixture of colorful spice and creamy sauce.

Eating mediocre foods depresses me, especially when I am tired. As a result, I've started to avoid working hard and to hate Stockholm.

In London, I didn't face this problem because there were some (if not many) decent, budget eateries. I frequented the Brazilian delicatessen next to Tottenham Court Road station (which, sadly, no longer exists due to the expansion of the station) in the evening when I was very busy writing up my job market paper. Supermarkets sold rather delicious Indian curry ready meals. I would buy at least two packs of Indian curry a week and eat them when I had to work till late.

A partial solution to this is to ask my parents and friends in Tokyo to send me packets of Japanese curry ready meal. They are vacuum-packed. But sending a packet from Japan to Sweden is quite expensive. I cannot resort to this option very often.

What should I do? After more than 2 years have passed since I moved here, I still don't know the solution.

Someone who's not really a considerate person would say, "Have a girlfriend who is a good cook or a good companion to fancy restaurants." If things were that easy, I wouldn't complain here.

Graffiti in Clifton Street Car Park

This is the kind of vibes in Hoxton.

Charlotte Road

 

Another example of the vibes of Hoxton. It makes me feel safe.

Hotel Review: The Hoxton Hotel

I stay at room 108 (a double room) of The Hoxton Hotel from 29 to 31 January, 2010. The first night costs 99 pounds while the second night costs 129 pounds.

The Good:

1. Stylish interior (pictured left).

2. Friendly staff.

3. Good location. The hotel is situated in Shoreditch, perhaps still the most edgy part of London. The Hoxton Square (where the White Cube contemporary art gallery is located with other trendy bars and cafes around) is within a few minutes by walk. Ten minutes or more take you to Brick Lane, the place to go for boho types (and Bengali curry lovers). For access to central London, Old Street tube station is five minutes away by walk. After the tube stops running at half past midnight, you can go back to the hotel from the city center by night bus easily (N35 from Tottenham Court Road, N55 from Oxford Circus, 243 from Aldwych).

4. The bed room is equipped with the not-so-touristy list of places to go in the Shoreditch area, which is also available on the website.

5. Not only is the Wireless broadband access available for free but also you don't need to enter any password to obtain access. Simple is the best.

6. Breakfast at the restaurant in the lobby, The Hoxton Grill (pictured above), is superb, if a bit pricey. I tried full breakfast (which includes black pudding) on the first morning. Even baked beans (which I don't really like) tasted good. I had pancake and bacon with maple syrup in the second morning. I expected an American pancake, but it was better than that. While the center part of pancakes is soft, the edge of pancakes is crispy and soaked in maple syrup. Yummy. For freshly squeezed juice, they serve not only orange juice (which every hotel does) but also pink grapefruit juice and watermelon juice. If you don't have time for breakfast or don't want to spend money, don't worry. A banana, a cup of yogurt, and freshly squeezed orange juice can be ordered for free at your preferred time. Since the bed room is equipped with an electric kettle (the common sense in UK but unfortunately not in other countries), Twinings tea bags (not Earl Grey or stupid flavored tea but proper black tea), and fresh milk in the fridge, you can have a hearty cup of milk tea right after you wake up, too. Very nice.

7. Two bottles of mineral water and a bottle of fresh milk are available in the fridge for free every day. There are no other unnecessary drinks in the fridge. But who need them? The front desk sells them for those who really need them.

8. The wake-up call can be snoozed once. (There's no alarm clock in the room.)

9. The soap bar provided in the bathroom smells very nice.

10. The dryer is provided in the bed room by default (in the desk drawer).

11. There are four electric sockets above (not below) the desk. One for the kettle, one for your laptop, one for your mobile phone charger, and still there's one extra.

12. Even though the ground floor lobby becomes a noisy bar after dark, bed rooms on the first floor remain quiet.

13. Wittiness. The invoice is entitled with "THE DAMAGE". On the bed room door, the instruction to use the safety box is entitled "Boring message number five" (I failed to find other four messages) and declares that they spend 175 pounds (if I remember correctly) for the safety box. The "Don't Disturb" door hanger instead reads: "Go Away."

The Bad:
Slightly tricky to arrive from airports except if you fly in to Gatwick (then you simply go to London Bridge station by train and change to the Northern Line for Old Street station).

The Ugly:

Nothing in particular.


Verdict: For a weekend city break in London, this is the ideal hotel for you.

Miso-marinated sea bass at The Engineer

The Engineer is a gastropub (a pub serving quality foods) located near Primrose Hill in London. Wallpaper City Guide London 2010 doesn't say much about foods when it introduces restaurants in London. It mostly talks about stylish decor. For The Engineer, however, it does mention quality foods that they serve.

Usually, the Wallpaper City Guide does describe what kind of foods each listed restaurant offers. For its London version, however, it seems difficult to praise foods offered by restaurants. :)

When I looked at its menu online, dishes are reasonably priced. So I picked this pub as a venue for dinner with a Japanese friend of mine.

Unfortunately, the meals that I have are not very great. However, the one that my friend orders---miso-marinated sea bass, bok choi, mash, soy & sherry sauce (17 pounds or 19.5 euro)---is superb. To our surprise, the taste of miso matches very well with mash. What's more, gari (thinly-sliced ginger pickled in sugar and vinegar, usually served with sushi in Japan) is hidden in the mash, and again, the sweet and sour taste of gari matches very well with miso and mash. This dish takes miso to another level. These days it's not that difficult to find an interesting European interpretation of Japanese food ingredients (for example, at Ljunggren in Stockholm). But it is rare to find a successful one.

By the way, the interior of The Engineer is decorated with flowery wallpapers (in Scandinavian taste, I would say). After dark, however, it's difficult to see them as the room is dimly lit. It's perhaps better to visit this place for lunch.

Camper Regent Street

Visiting Camper's flagship store in London at 207-209 Regent Street is a joy. Opened on September 25, 2009, the Spanish shoe brand's shop is designed by Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka. Customers trying on shoes sit on his critically-acclaimed "Bouquet by Moroso" chairs made of paper tissues of reddish colors. One side of the wall is also covered with crimson paper tissues. Amazingly, Yoshioka's design is well matched with our common image of Spain, where Camper comes from. The place is perhaps the most delightful and thoughtful shoe store in the world.

 

V&A Medieval and Renaissance Gallery

The much-hyped medieval and renaissance gallery, opened last December, at the Victoria and Albert Museum (aka V&A) indeed beautifully showcases European design from the Middle Ages. Or I should not use the term "showcase" because they do much more than simply putting items in showcases.

Enter the museum from Cromwell Road and take the staircases on the right downstairs. Here you learn Romanesque and Gothic styles of design visually, because the first thing you will see is:

Then in the next room you encounter:

 

Like other newly-renovated galleries such as The Jameel Gallery on Islamic art and The Dorothy and Michael Hintze Galleries on sculpture, the V&A is very good in this gallery, too, at displaying objects in a way that enhances their attractiveness: 

Go upstairs to the ground floor. There the V&A has transformed the gallery space into a medieval court yard with the glass roof letting the sunlight fall. The view from the first floor balcony (pictured right) is elegant. 

The first floor gallery rooms feature Renaissance art. Here I do feel a completely different atmosphere, and I personally find it uneasy. The Renaissance style is too well-organized. It even feels a bit pretentious. That's my personal take, but it also means that the V&A succeeds in transforming the general theme underlying Renaissance into the gallery's vibes before explaining what Renaissance is about in words.

Before encountering the V&A during my life in London, I didn't understand the merit of visiting museums at all. The V&A changed my idea of a museum completely. They display objects as if they were decorating the living room. They present the whole gallery space as something pleasant to stay in. That helps visitors really appreciate the displayed objects. If you hate museums, think again when it comes to the V&A.

Skogskyrkogården in winter

Last summer I visited Skogskyrkogården. I visit the Woodland Cemetery again today, when the temperature has been below zero for the past one month or so. It turns out that the Cemetery completely changes its face in winter, perhaps more beautiful and thoughtful.

All the white LED-illuminated trees in Tokyo become a lame once you see all these trees.

And I understand why Erik Gunnar Asplund designed the cemetery as the woods. With tall trees looking down tomb stones, the bereaved who visit this cemetery realize that, no matter how sad their loss is, it is a small, integral part of nature, the fact that helps them accept the loss.

 When I look up, the view looks as if I were watching an abstract painting.

 

Pictured above: The sidewalk on the road connecting the Cemetery and the metro station

Verner Panton

(The photo taken from Excite Ism)

I didn't know who Verner Panton was. But this Danish interior designer is apparently one of the must-know persons in the history of design, and the picture above (used in the flyer for the exhibition held at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery until today) is intriguing enough for me to decide to visit the Gallery just one hour before the closing time.

Skipping the first section on the biography of Verner Panton and his early works on display (which I think is a bit boring way of introducing the whole exhibition), the corn chairs and other geometrically-shaped chairs catch my eyes:
(The photo taken from Excite Ism)

Using the inverted circular cone as a chair is the idea Panton came up with back in 1958. It is actually a functional idea. A circular cone has a flat surface that can be used as a seat and the cone part can be used as a support for the chair.

This obsession with a chair that doesn't have a standard form culminates into the Panton Chair (the photo to the right, taken from Wikipedia):

This chair is familiar to me because I often have lunch by sitting on this chair at the cafe in my Stockholm workplace. The exhibition tells visitors that Panton invented the concept in 1965. Technology at that time did not allow the concept to materialize in the commercially viable form. Only in the early 1990s, plastic materials became sturdy enough to realize this chair shape durable for a long time. Usually, people whose idea is too advanced are only cherished in history. In the case of Panton, we can appreciate his idea in real time, for example, at the cafe in my workplace.

What really blows my mind, however, is his talent in space design. The exhibition replicates two installations he produced back in 1970. The first is Phantasy Landscape, shown in the picture at the top of this blog entry which does not really tell what this is about. It's a cave-like structure made of foam rubber. Visitors can sit down, lie down, and even sleep. What strikes me is that this space makes people look happy. When I enter into this cave, quite a few people are sitting, chatting, and sleeping. The crowd usually looks a bit annoying and can be intimidating. Here in this cave these people look beautiful. This is an installation that comes to fruition when it interacts with people, a very popular idea for today's art installation. But Panton did this almost 40 years ago.

The second mind-blower is 3-D Carpet "Wave". A huge red carpet that has wave-like humps, which can be used as a chair, a sofa, or a pillow. Visitors sit down and lie down on their back on this carpet to watch a film on Verner Panton on the wall screen. The view of this installation is again a very pleasant experience. People apparently enjoy it. You feel it by looking at their faces. And I myself enjoy chilling on a wave-hump.

Some nightclubs and bars should adopt these two spaces designed by Panton. Actually, some of the other spaces produced by Panton appear to have influenced the design of some nightclubs and bars today. The decor of Cocoon in Frankfurt and Zouk in Singapore, I believe, has some traces of his design, if not intentional.

On the way home, I read a giveaway leaflet for this exhibition. I learn the following behind-the-curtain episode. Directed by the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, the exhibition has been on the world tour since 2000. However, the Tokyo version is curated quite differently from the earlier exhibitions in other countries. While Panton's works were on display chronologically and often in the same room in those earlier exhibitions, Ichiro Katami and Uichi Yamamoto, the directors for the Tokyo exhibition, thought such a way of exhibition wouldn't be effective enough to deliver Panton's pursuit of fantasy space to visitors. Consequently, at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, they split the exhibition space into several separated booths each of which represents different philosophies Panton embodied into his works. Plus, the 3-D Carpet replica was made specially for this Tokyo exhibition. In other words, people in other countries who visited this exhibition were unable to experience that happy atmosphere.

Another reason to believe that Tokyo is the world's most interesting city.