This whole week I have hosted a train-the-trainers training at the office. Two people from the Lund office have been visiting and I have helped them out, coordinating and supporting.

But at 6 pm I had to leave managing by the selves as I had to leave to get to Xian in Ginza by 6:30 pm. I left a bit later then 6 pm so I jumped into a taxi. And it was a really fun ride.

It turned out the driver had a wife from Scotland so we talked about Scotland, Japan and Sweden. It is interesting to hear what Japanese people know about Sweden because it usually tells you a lot about them.

The driver, for instance, he knew about Ingemar Stenmark and he liked skiing of course, though his pronunciation was more like in-ge-ma-ru su-te-n-ma-a-ku because we spoke in Japanese. We also talked about the midnight sun in Swedish summer time and about the darkness during winter time, this is a subject that seems to facinate most Japanese.

Another very comon topic is soccer or football as we call it in Europe. It is a popular sport here in Japan, but my taxi driver for today seemed to have no such interests. He was more focused on skiing, midnight sun, and bubble economy in Japan.

Zig-zagging between pedestrians, it was Friday night in Ginza and many people had gotten their year end bonuses, we eventually arrived at the Chinese restaurant Xian. Chie and some other friends had already started eating as I was a little late.

We had some small starters but the main dish was Chinese style nabe (hot pot). Boiling bullion were you cook vegetables, mushroom, and meat of various kinds. This Chinese version had a pot with two parts, one with non-spicy bullion and one with spicy bullion.

We talked and ate and talked until we could not eat nor talk anymore. Well, the latter may be a small lie but I liked the rhythm of the sentence that way 😉