I think my favorite TED conference was the one about happiness, so many amazing talks. In this talk Dan Gilbert explains how people synthesize happiness, while most people think that happiness is something to be found.

Hjartesmil wrote a little list yesterday over things she wanted atm, so I thought I would follow up and make a little list of my own. Starting out – I want sushi that looks like this. I want quail-eggs and tobikko. Mmm…

New hair! I think I am going for this one, but I think it is a bit long. I guess that is what scissors are for. I might buy it tomorrow, but in chocolate brown. (Picture courtesy of Rakuten)

A remote release for my camera.

A small bird. I would call her Momoko, and I would love her immensely. She would sit on my mac while I am editing pictures and sit on my pencil when I write kanji. (This picture is 8 years old, I can not believe how long it has been!)

I would love some fresh berries right now – real blueberries, the ones that are blue on the inside as well and not the fake white ones, and wild tiny strawberries that are nothing like the strawberries you buy at the store.

And a little jewelry box filled to the rim with sparkly things, just because.

And last, but not least, I want to wish my grandmother a happy 95th birthday. I wish I could have been there and given her a great big hug. ♥ 95 and still rockin’ it!

Happy birthday Mormor! ♥

Today is one of those days where I just want to curl up in bed and read and not think about responsibilities or homework.

Today was a good day. First, I went to a cafe to do language exchange with a lovely Japanese girl I have just gotten to know. Believe it or not, Japanese people wanting to learn Norwegian do exist in Tokyo, but they are few and far between. We talked in a strange mix of Japanese, Norwegian and some English when neither of us could explain what we meant in the two first languages. I found it incredibly useful to actually just talk freely to someone Japanese instead of in the classroom, at least I always manage to say more in such a free situation than what I thought I would be able to do. It must have sounded funny to the people around us in the cafe – my messed up Japanese, followed by some English explanations, mixed in with a couple of Norwegian phrases.

I love how everyone have aloe vera growing in little pots outside their houses.

And then I decided to walk back into Shinjuku (新宿), here coming close to Kabukichō (歌舞伎町).

Kabukichō is just a sweet mess of host- and hostess-bars, restaurants and adult entertainment, and of course a ton of love-hotels towards the Shin-Okubo area. It is quite charming in its own busy, strange and peculiar way.

And then I went to Muji – Japan’s answer to IKEA. I was a good girl and did not spend my money in there today.

But I looked at all the pretty sparkly things.

And all the restaurants I have never eaten at…

I passed this store, because I was heading to…

Marui! They have a cute shopping center for the.. eh.. specially interested. They have a whole floor of Lolita goods, one floor of princess goods, one floor of punk and a quite a few other floors filled with mori-fashion and other cute things. I am not particularly into those fashions, but I went to look for some makeup and hair-accessories. This is from the escalator – you are, as always, not allowed to take pictures inside the stores, but I shot this one from my hip because I thought the walls were cute.

And then I went to H&M, and was really lucky in my bargain hunt. Full price for above items: 5100円. What I paid: 600円.

And last, but not least, I went to Sekaido like a good girl and bought notebooks for school. I like to trick my brain into thinking that classes are even more interesting than what they are by buying new notebooks and plastic folders for each term. Oh the joys of new stationery ♥

(This was a song that Jennifer Warnes co-wrote with Leonard Cohen and it appears on her album “Famous Blue Raincoat”. One of the great overlooked albums of the 80’s.)

I have been listening to this all weekend. It makes me want to burst out in tears – or laughter. I don’t know. I don’t get these musical epiphanies often anymore. So when they finally come, few and far between, I feel happy and overwhelmed, even though the songs that cause the epiphany usually contain some kind of melancholy.

I’m magic – I made food! My endeavors with cooking continue. I still do not enjoy it. I was scared of the flaming heat from the stove and tried to stand as far away as possible when mixing the vegetables. I think it turned out okay, and did not taste only of blood, sweat and tears, but also vegetables and soy sauce.

One day I think I will go out and just take pictures of all the mascots I can find in about one hour around Shinjuku and Shin-Okubo. Funny how they have cute mascots of pigs and chickens at a place which well, fries them up and them serves them on a plate to you. It reminds me of the fish market in Norway, where they had a cute little drawing of a whale with the cute text underneath “We have whale!”

After cooking dinner the previous night, it was time to have someone else do the hard work. Waiting at the station to go out for dinner the next day…

I found a palm tree while walking to school! And on the right – waiting for dinner to be served at the izakaya we went to. Ah, Fridays! ♥

1. I looked over some of my favorite illustration web pages, and I keep returning to Linn Olofsdotter. I want to make beautiful things like her one day.
2. Some nice people have just started their blogs lately, so if you like photography, you should absolutely visit tippi+ella and creativedaysblog.
3. Mozart is the most productive productive girl on the entire internet. I can not understand how she finds time to make so many beautiful things.
4. Binka wrote a 10 point list against writers block, and I think it is a great list. The list is in Norwegian.
5. Julia Galdo‘s photography is just jaw dropping, and I especially like the series taken for S Magazine.

(Ok, so I cheated a little bit – I fell asleep, and it is Saturday here before I could publish this post. Whups.)

I posted some of the pictures of last year’s hanami in my summary post for april 2010 but I did not post all of them, so here they are. I can not wait for hanami this year. Two months, and spring is coming ♥

It’s Friday. It is one year and nine days since I moved to Japan. It is about six weeks since this season’s state of constant cold started. It is three days since this term of Japanese started up. It is one month since my birthday already. I am still cold. I feel like my hands are in a constant state of cold like little icicles, my torso is warm but I am still shivering from the cold. It is a calm evening, and I can not seem to start the long list of things I want to do, simply because both my mind and my hands feels numb and slow from the cold. I want spring. Just a little longer, just another month or two now…

I used to love this movie just a couple of years ago, and I just rediscovered it. This is the first part. The buildings in the background and the details and love that went into this film is just beautiful.

(“Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist film in the science-fiction genre directed by Fritz Lang. Produced in Germany during a stable period of the Weimar Republic, Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and makes use of this context to explore the social crisis between workers and owners in capitalism. The most expensive silent film ever made, it cost approximately 5 million Reichsmark.” Taken from Wikipedia.)