Stockholm

I owe you guys a Project 366: October, but first wanted to share a little trip I took. I went to Stockholm for four days to speak on an APG Sweden panel, and run two all-day workshops with Jonas. It was an insane whirlwind of a trip, and, bookended by the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, made my first time in Scandinavia's dreaminess even more pronounced.

I was on one of the handful of people flying out of Newark, the day it re-opened after the hurricane. It was a total ghost town.

I took an overnight, direct flight and landed in Stockholm at 6AM. It was still dark out, and I got to see the sun rise through an express train ride into the city. I was greeted by a very familiar view, and a cheeky welcome card on my bed.

The rest of the trip was a bit of a blur, but included delightful things like walking over bridges, hearing a bit of Stockholm history, speaking on a panel, eating delicious food, teaching two very insightful and intensely curious classes of students (one at Hyper Island, and one at Berghs School of Communication), meeting up on very short notice with Jordan (former colleague and recent Stockholm resident), and getting caught up in many costumed crowds in spillover Halloween parties (one of them being a Clockwork Orange themed event in my hotel, full of guests in all white, suspenders and eye makeup).

My favorite part of Stockholm was the neighborhood around the Telefonplan train station. I was exhausted on this morning, and listening to music with clicks and glitchiness. The landscape, lines, buildings, sky and general feel were the most unfamiliar to me - more industrial than the main part of Stockholm, but with a clean and angular touch that felt like Proem or Efterklang tracks.

Jonas told me that a large group of building we walked around were all part of the original Ericsson campus, but that it was slowly converting into a design district of sorts - design studios, galleries, and even Hyper Island all live there.

A huge thanks to Mike for linking Jonas and I up for this, and to Jonas for being a fantastic host and colleague for this project - I hope it can happen again.

Thinking in context

Just a quick thing I thought about upon walking into Terminal 5 tonight (for the first time, too: I looked like Dorothy when Oz blessed her with Techicolor). Right when you get through security, you're greeted with this beautiful image:


MUJI is one of my favorite stores, and not only because it's from Japan. I love its stark, utilitarian aesthetic and have found many a useful (and attractive) thing there – most notably their little PET travel bottles.

While we're on the topic of having to put liquids into tiny bottles (let's pretend the liquids ban here stays put for a while), and while we're also on the topic of stores in an airport (see where I'm going with this?)... Wouldn't it be cool if the store was moved a couple hundred feet to before you go through security*, so that in the case that you forgot about the liquids ban and brought your 10 oz. bottle of hair gel, you could buy some little PET bottles to transfer some of it into? You wouldn't have to throw the entire thing away (and thus also not have to worry about where you'll get your hair gel fix once you arrive at your destination).

Taking it one step further: wouldn't it be cool if this moved-200-feet MUJI store had a "liquids transfer station" inside, with cute little funnels and a sink for spills, to facilitate the transfer of said hair gel? Man, I would love that.

* Is this even allowed?

The Arrival

I wrote this last night while half awake and just remembered about it! Yes, I'm alive. Hopefully the next time I'm this busy, I'll force myself to stay awake again and write. In short, the past two or three weeks have been solidly filled with a new and super exciting project. In between, I took a long weekend for my birthday! Speaking of, let's talk about one of the coolest gifts I got this year.


The Arrival is a graphic novel. Though: there are no words in it. Shaun Tan drew this entire thing with pencil, and makes one feel like they're looking through a photo album rather than reading a story; check out these clouds he drew in 60 different ways:


The book is about a man who travels to another land to make a better life for himself and his family. The journey begins with their tearful goodbye, the train and ship that take him to the new place, and the immense line of fellow immigrants waiting to sign their way into their new lives.


The man gets lost and confused, can't read the new language, draws pictures to communicate with others, is befuddled by strange-looking foods and creatures, looks for work and meets other people who have come to the same place with similar stories of finding a better life. You see him gaze at the family portrait that he has brought with him while alone in his room, and the loneliness /longing for his family is palpable.


My boyfriend told me that he had read about The Arrival in the New York Times some time ago, so I looked it up and found a review. They put it well:

“The Arrival” tells not an immigrant’s story, but the immigrant’s story. ... By borrowing American imagery to communicate an otherwise universal story, Tan highlights just how central the immigrant experience is to the way America defines itself.

Something about this book feels so real, even though the fantastical gadgets, food, animals and alphabet in this unnamed land are completely made up. Tan's thank-you in the back of the book talks about how he was inspired by things like photographs taken at Ellis Island, and a famous shot of a newspaper boy announcing the sinking of the Titanic. But maybe even more than this, it's because this is how anybody must feel when traveling to a completely foreign place. Even though I had the luxury of the Internet and some prior knowledge of Japanese culture before going over there in the spring (for example), I can identify with this main character a lot of the time in his confusion and feeling of homesickness in a sea full of people. Conveying all of these feelings without even writing a word is truly awesome.

South America

I've been back for a week and a half, but now I finally have all the photos I need to tell stories. I'll try to be succinct here. MT, John, Kacy and I traveled to Brazil and Colombia for some work /meetings. I had never been to either country, so I was really excited.

São Paulo was awesome. Our hotel had - among three million other awesome things - circular windows in all of the rooms.


[looks like a fish-eye lomo, right?]
There was a long rectangular pool on the roof, paved with red mosaic tiles. We called it the Blood Pool and - since we weren't really allowed to leave our hotel aside from our meetings (we had a long-running "ATM Stickup" joke going) - spent most of our (working (ha)) time there. We had a 360° view of the city from the roof too, which was beautiful.


[MT on a conference call]


[Kacy working in the Blood Pool]

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Okay, the real adventures began after this. We decided - upon our client's suggestion - to visit the beach at Maresias, "a two to two and a half hour drive from São Paulo." I put that in quotes because guess how long our drive took. Yes you guessed right - six and a half hours. This was one of the most maddening journeys ever, because our driver spoke no English. Kacy was able to speak to him in French a tiny bit, but his French wasn't very terrific at all. To top it off, the most terrible Brazilian pop radio station was playing in John's ear the entire time. I think he was close to jumping out of the van.

At one point, we were starving and needed to use the bathroom. The driver pulled over to the first available place, in the middle-of-nowhere rural Brazil. This place was equal parts fish farm, pool hall, tikki bar and outdoor restaurant. It was fascinating, and we never would have gotten this taste of local flavor had we taken our originally-planned helicopter to the beach (the fog over the mountains ended up being bad that day).




The next day (at the hotel in Maresias, finally) was my 25th birthday. It was the best birthday of my life. We spent the entire day on this beach, where mountains jutted out of the sea. I climbed some rocks at the end of the beach and thought about Puerto Rico the whole time.

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Now let me tell you about the drive back. It took less time than the drive there, but was more terrifying. Very terrifying. Long story short, it was looking impossible to get back to the city. Problems with the helicopter again, our hotel hadn't sent a driver, there was only one driver at the beach resort with a tiny car, etc. He ended up calling his friend to drive as well, so we had two cars and enough room for our luggage.

This was a bad idea. But we were so desperate to get back to São Paulo that we really weren't thinking clearly. Kacy and I ended up getting into this two-door, teal tin can Fiat. The ceiling was practically rotting onto us, and there were blankets and newspapers covering the floor. The "driver" was a huge man with a huge scar on one side of his face. He was not a driver. He was just the resort's driver's buddy, who happened to have a car. MT and John later told us that their guy was driving on the shoulder of the highway the entire time, and sometimes on the wrong side of the road (just to pass cars). Neither driver spoke English.

At one point, our driver started cursing and pulled over to the side of the highway. He said something to the effect of "one minute" in Portuguese dialect /slang, and ran out of the car, away from us.

Here is the house we were parked next to. There were wild roosters running around, and a strange man that walked right behind our car (from the strange house? We have no idea) and came inches from the driver's side. Kacy and I thought he was going to get in and drive us away to kill us somewhere, so we lunged forward and slammed down on the locks. Turns out he was just taking a stroll down the highway, walking around our car (on the traffic side?) instead of at the edge of the road.




We still don't know why our guy ran away from the car. He went to talk to a group of bikers for 15 minutes. Kacy guessed that he was either in the market for a bike and wanted to ask them about it, was lost, was buying drugs, or was friends with the guys and "just wanted to say hi."

Needless to say, we all kissed the floors of our circle-windowed, blood-pool-on-the-roof hotel when we finally got back.

Our final dinner in Brazil was at a restaurant built around a 200 year-old fig tree. Best meal of the trip thus far.

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I loved Bogotá. I kind of thought that it would be a "this could be any city" metropolis, because my parents lived there for 3.5 years in the 1970s when my father was the Colombia Head of Operations for an international bank. I guess I thought that it was a bustling business city. Well, it is, but it's beautiful. It has such an old-style, provincial feel to it. Downtown Bogotá has gotten very safe lately - we were able to walk around freely without feeling scared at all.


Everybody is beautifully dressed in Bogotá. The women look impeccable and the men are all wearing suits everywhere and carrying themselves so well.


We also noticed this amazing juice-drinking phenomenon. At lunches and dinners filled with businessmen and politicians, everybody is ordering tropical fruit juices to have with their meals. One of the clients ordered us glasses of feijoa juice - a fruit I had never even heard of - and it was delicious. He told us that a fun thing to do is to go to a restaurant and order every single juice on the menu. I wish we had known that sooner. This just means we'll have to return ASAP to try it out.




This trip was incredible. amazing. I can't even believe I got to be a part of it. Between the hard work, long meetings, longer drives and scary adventures... wouldn't have changed a thing. Not even our friend ScarFace.

[photos by Kacy and me]