Daily Archives: August 21, 2011

Work Trip to Beijing

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It’s Sunday and I am going to Beijing. I’ll be there the whole week to support the Open Source work there and to carry out Open Source training together with my work colleague Calle from Lund.

Getting to the Marriot Courtyard hotel always (well this is the second time in Beijing) proves to be tricky. This time I brought a map, but still the taxi driver seemed to not know where the hotel was located in the beginning. Though we ended up at the right place in the end.

Once at the hotel I went to their gym for a workout. First time since going on a vacation a while back. Did some running and some chest. Felt really great to workout again 🙂

In the evening I met Calle and we went for a dinner to a Szechuan restaurant about 5 minutes walk from the hotel.



The food was good and the restaurant was quite nice. It seemed to be an old restaurant with old wooden floors etc. After the dinner we went directly back to the hotel. And I went to bed.

Kobuchihama Starting to Move into Temporary Homes

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Finally the small fishing village of Kobuchihama is getting temporary homes. From August the first could start moving in to their new, but temporary, homes. However this has some complications.

From living together in group where all costs were shared to now living with only your family or alone. It also means many people need to get hold of things all of us take for granted in a home. But without any means to pay for it since they still have not got their fishing industry going. Resulting in that the only means to get an income is to go to the mainland and clean up areas that was destroyed by the tsunami. For that each person get 2000 JPY a day.

This also means the help we provide have changed. In the beginning they did not have anything. So the most urgent and important things to help out with at that time was water and food. But now they have a small income and food supplies reach the area so there is food available in grocery stores etc. Some still need help with the basic things for starting their new life in the temporary homes though.

With the help from Ishihara-san, we have shipped a few things directly to some families that recently moved into their new temporary homes. The basic need is to be able to keep it clean so they had asked for help getting vacuum cleaners, dehumidifiers, and air cleaner. You can find the details here.

Review of Piren Bar

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Helena, as we talked about when we had dinner at Mäster Anders the other day, we promised to let you know how Piren Bar was after our visit there. For short, you do not need to visit!

The food is only OK, and you would expect something more for that price. The desert, a rhubarb pie with vanilla ice cream was a real disappointment – it was a rhubarb compote topped with pieces of cardamom rusk (kardemummaskorpor). Cold. I had expected a yummy hot delicious rhubarb pie directly from the oven with melting creamy vanilla ice cream on top.

  • View: 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
  • Location: 🙂 🙂
  • Food: 🙂 🙂 🙂
  • Service: 🙂 🙂 🙂
  • Overall: 🙂 🙂 🙂

We had a visit to Mancini at Tunnelgatan as well. It is in the same price range but much better experience, if you like Italian food. The food was excellent and you could feel the personnel loved Italian food and were proud of working at Mancini, whereas at Piren Bar the service was not bad but you felt the personnel did not really care if they worked there or at any other restaurant in Stockholm.