Little New York, by Waki Yamato

Little New York Vol. 8 by Waki Yamato
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had no really much idea of what to expect from this manga, except that I knew the mangaka from before (from Hakara-san ga toru).
Similarly to the other manga I read, the protagonist is an "odd" girl, odd considering the epoch and Japan, which encounters her true love and plenty of obstacles on the way.
Partially, the two stories do not differ too much from each other. The protagonist, as Benio in Hakara-san ga toru, is a strong and not conventional feminine character. In particular, Shino has been grown as a boy from her father and has to learn her way to be feminine.
This is also the trademark for oddity and that gives the chance to open an eye on the changes that Japan is going through, when it finally open its doors to the Western world, in particular USA.
What I thought was very interesting of the manga, except for the nice but possibly a bit trivial story, was the possibility to understand this specific historical period of Japan and how controversial certain things that we nowadays give for granted were back then.
The influences and progresses carried on by the Americans are seen as positive by the author, although she doesn't hide the fact that in reality things didn't run smooth at all for several reasons.
A part from the historical background, if the female protagonist is a interesting character, her "true love", is a bit too dull and belonging to some "typical" romantic and idealized stereotype. However, the other characters (both male and females) that become key figures in the plot, have a much more interesting deepnees and provide also a touch of humour there and then.
On top of this, I find the drawings very beautiful, probably because they are typical from the 70s (although this manga was published at the end of the 80s), as Waki Yamato's style is.
As summary, I strongly recommend this manga for whoever is interested in reading an historical romantic story, with a tears-enriched ending.

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Buon Natale/God Jul/Merry Christmas

"Julskinka"

JapanPhoto on the pyre!

It is soon Christmas and, of course, now that we are parents too, we feel the pressure to produce fancy Christmas cards to send to relative and friends, calendars, photobooks, mugs, keyrings...
Last year, I experimented using Cewe Photobook to produce a photobook and a calendar. Everything went very fine and I was very satisfied of the result.
So, this year, I thought of using the same software and service, via JapanPhoto, a relevant swedish chain for photo products.

Well. If you were expecting a cute card of Isabella this year, you will not receive it thanks to them!
After spending an evening working on cards layout and not, we sent out the order. It was the 4th of December.
Yesterday, after 2 weeks of silence, I decided to start to contact support. When I was logging in on the homepage, I could not find the orders made.
The support answered few hours after my first message, providing the order numbers and stating that there had been a problem issuing the products I have been ordering.
Of course, I didn't get notified of this and I asked her why, which problems had been encountered and when I could get the stuff I wanted.
The woman kindly replied for the second time, repeating that if I wanted I could get credited (of what? I hadn't paid yet) and that, due to the holidays, I'd see everything in the beginning of January.
I decided to contact the online support and after providing the order numbers, they could tell me that ONE of the things I had been ordered where in the shop, while the others.. puff! No trace of them.
I ask what I could do, since I was getting penalized by this (thing that I asked also to the email support, which kindly stop replying to me) and they told me that I could not get any benefit from them, except a discount based on the price that I was going to get when I made my order, and that I could print the Christmas cards directly at the shop, after redesigning them.
I tried to call the shop, even, but they gave me a number (the number pointed out to the same support person that had answered me via chat) and said again, that I could print my cards (and hope that Santa will have a magic wand to send them allover the globe in 1 day, sure!) at the shop.

Me and Mattias agreed that at this point it was pointless to print the Christmas cards (sadly, since the one we made was very cute!) and today, I went to pick up what else I had ordered promising myself I'd report the feedback of such experience.
When I explained what happened to the shop assistant she just barely apologize and said "Well, at least, you have this item now". Well, thank you very much!

If this is the way you threat customers, considering that of course we will disappoint some people that maybe were expecting the card and ourselves, we will never never never buy anything from you!
And I hope that, whoever will read this experience will remember that they will never get anything to compensate the frustration of a missing order.

Cardano al Campo - Åkarp

We are possibly known to always choose perfect timing for certain things, and let's say that taking the car from Italy to Sweden could have been done in another moment of the year, without involving this much snow.

Nevertheless, we travelled just bringing few essentials from my home, leaving on a Tuesday afternoon.
Mattias, the official chauffeur of this tour, took it very easy and according to the speed limits (no comment here...) especially through Switzerland.
The roads were snowy and after crossing even Austria, we landed in Germany.
It was also getting dark, it was time to make Isabella eat (and possibly sleep) and we decided to leave the highway for trying to find a random place to sleep (yes, we were very well organized for our trip).
Pity though that it was pitch black so it was not possible to see anything around us and unluckily, my sim card was not very cooperative when on roaming. After few tricks, we finally managed to use TripAdvisor and landed in a pitoresque and drowned in snow little town, Kißlegg.
The hotel that we managed to find was called Hotell Gasthof Ochsen.
The place was cosy, the staff very professional and helpful and the room comfortable and clean.
The only problem was that it was too warm for us (as almost every place, at night), but otherwise it was very spacious and had a good price as well.
We even ate at the restaurant and the menu was quite interesting and what we ate was very much appreciated: however, we didn't have the time to think through our choices or enjoy fully our food since our daughter was in the way most of the times ;-)
The waitress tried to distract her with some crayons and paper but the result became more work for us :)

After a restorative (sort of) night, we took off again and the driver made a big leap, in the morning, and covered a quite nice distance.
Pity, though, it was very much starting to snow again.

Not too far from the highway

We stopped to eat at some random place on the highway, nothing that is worth even remembering and, hoping that we would be home in the evening, we put ourselves in the car and started the trip again.

800 km to go

Well. That was about it, basically. It some indefinite part of Germany, a queue started to form. We could simply not move forward that much, and the trucks we were passing were standing still or attempting to move in a quite messy road.
We lost 2-3 hours of our trip just hoping something would get better. Luckily, Mattias took advantage of the forced break to read the instructions of the car navigator and learnt that it pointed out the existance of queues or road blocks, so as soon as we could, we decided to go out from the A7 to get into the "road 27", which was almost running parallel and with less queues.
That went fine, pity that when it was time to get back to the highway we managed to take the A4 towards Berlin...and that was definitely not our intention.
After losing so much time (and patience - just imagine singing "Mamma mia" 700 times per hour...) we decided that we could not make an attempt to go home that day: it was too dark and the weather was still bad. It was time to find yet another random place where to stop for the night.
This time, we went out at Kassel but instead of going to the big town we moved towards Kaufungen and the only free hotel was something called Burgerhaus.
Here two waitress were attending too many tables, swirling around them with an impressive efficiency. In all of this, they even managed to give us a room and bring us to it.
The room was far from being as cosy as the other place, and despite the "forbidden to smoke" sign, everything had a fantastic background taste of smoke.
The dinner was the usual show, trying to feed our little overtired beast, and eating some nice steak at the same time.

A room with a view

Collecting energy at breakfast

OK! Just 684 km to go! The navigator was targetting our arrival at destination at 15:11. What a woman! She guessed just right!
The last part of the trip went definitely smoother than the rest. The roads were almost clean and we were just so happy of reaching Denmark, after a short ferry journey, with only 200 km to go.

Last part of Germany, reaching Puttgarden

A familiar danish landscape

 Reaching Sweden was the best part of the trip. It never felt nicer to finally arrive there, even though we were slightly afraid that all our imported food (among other things) would have been confiscated.
But, well, despite everything and the fact that we arrived on a Thursday at 15:11 (almost) extending our trip of 7 long hours, we are very happy that we have done this and that we have managed to bring so much stuff home, especially the "affettatrice" (slicer) which we inaugurated today with great success!
Now, next trip (possibly done in a better season) it will be the turn of carry north books and manga!

Osteria Qui

We have finally had the opportunity to go out for dinner yesterday. The occasion was to celebrate my mother's birthday and we decided to explore a new restaurant that have quite good reviews.
Unfortunately, due to the fact that I was mostly busy eating and taking care of Isabella at the same time, I didn't manage to take pictures of some of the dishes.

The restaurant, located near a fancy residential area in Malmö, is called Osteria Qui.
The place is quite cosy, although the environment is modern, but it surely is not exactly looking like a traditional Osteria.
The food served though is quite simple, the menu gives me really the sensation of an Osteria menu.

Me and Mattias decided to go for the Christmas menu, which included a marinated anchovies, tortellini in broth or spaghetti with parsley, garlic and anchovies for primo, lamb racks or cod for secondo. And on top of that, there was a ricotta pudding.
My mother took instead penne all'arrabbiata and a caprese salad.

In general the food was actually quite tasty and quite genuine. My broth was very very tasty and both the two secondo were worthy waiting.
However, the penne of my mother dish were most likely pre-cooked, which was a pity because the tomato sauce, although enriched with a bit too much garlic, was very good.
The main issue we encountered with the food was that the portions were too small for our appetite. Especially my tortellini dish. It is not that we went out starving, but we took a complete menu and we were still hungry when we went home.
I didn't appreciate fully the dessert, a bit too much touched by some liquor, while Mattias, as a good Swede, enjoyed it.

In general, it was a quite ok evening (if we exclude Isabella getting a bit too tired and exploring my bag and the fact that my diners were a bit too quiet), but for us, it took about 2 hours and something to get through the food and between each dish we waited too long time. That was also having a bad effect on Isabella's patience, of course.
But we were also very unfortunate with the ventilation. Something went wrong and at a certain point the whole restaurant was filled with a thick "grilling" smoke. The only way to solve the problem was to let us freeze a bit, opening the main door. That didn't help our "parfume" on our way home: we all smelled like grilled meat.

So, a positive experience considering that the restaurant have been opened for three months, but the price/portion ration can be improved and they surely need to speed up the service and fix the ventilation!

An improvised pizza

Last sunday we actually forgot to plan for our standard Sunday pizza and we ended up putting as topping some leftovers.
Specifically a green pepper and some spring onions...

It wasn't the best pizza ever, but it worked for that occasion!