Franz Mayer of Munich

The atelier downstairs to my office makes my brain drool with envy...




One day when we didn't have much to do in the office, Andreas took me downstairs to see the studio of Franz Mayer of Munich. Initially I didn't have much of an idea what the office does, I know they make mosaic and glasses, but what could be so special? That's before I saw their studio! Oh my! What enviable lives! It's not just any mosaic or glasses, its art pieces mosaic (they make the big murals in NYC's subway) and church-grade stained windows!!!

Above is the pictures of the glassmaking in process. On the first picture is the studio where they draw the stained glass in question. They have big mirrors above their studio space so they can see the images inverted. After the drawing is done, the image is taken to the person who shapes the colored glass one by one (second pic), and then it is drawn on. After all the pieces are ready, they are put together manually with lead as the binding 'glue' (third pic).

Below is one of the mosaic pieces that I was quite taken by. It's like *whoaaah!!!* painting with coloured tiles! I wonder what it feels to work patiently like this for life: a steady artists' job making mosaics and glasses all life long. The lady there told me that most people who worked there, have been there for 20 years and more. It seems like such a certain way of life... certainly beautiful one. Or is it...? Deep down in my heart I was thinking to myself, if I could have another life, this is it.


As the home for the atelier, the building naturally has a lot of stained glass and mosaic art pieces embelishing it, making the office space more homey and livable. Below is the glasses that I pass everyday to work, they make my day feels brighter, and not just "this is another boring office job in a boring bozy glassy office" kinda feeling...

Jesus in three hip colors, orange, blue and pink!

Snow white stained glass on the 4th floor above. It's on display along with puss-in-boots, mother goose and other cute fairytaile stained glasses.

Giardino Giusti, Verona

The only day I get to spend in Verona is a rainy day.
There, I spent the day (yesterday) with dripping wet bag and soaked feet, which is probably why I am having headaches right now. But the good thing is, the rain makes the experience of the garden feel more somber and melamcholic. It also drives away other visitors, and even the ticketing person! Making the garden visit a free entry for me, and me alone for the hour.





Walking in this garden makes you feel that you are in another era, and that's a no wonder, when you read its long established history:

Built in 1570, the basic design of this Giardino Giusti is almost half a millennia old. And if that is not old enough, they say that parts of the garden is even older than that, with 700-year old cypresses predating the foundation of the garden. The elaborate myrtle hedges however, is a later addition from the 1786.

The garden is one of the oldest in Italy, and has been called the most important of the renaissance gardens. Since the 16th century, a trip to the garden is usually included as a part of the Grand Tour (educational trips of young aristrocats), and it has had illustrious visitors, including Mozart and Goethe, who supposedly wrote one of his books under its towering cypresses.

Bologna Weekend

They say all roads leads to Rome. But for me, no matter how much I love Rome, the roads seems to lead to Bologna more than Rome.

For the 4th time, I'm back in Bologna. First visit was to see Gabri whom I met in the previous year. Second was as a part of uni's northern Italy trip. Third was to visit Gab again on the way to Cinque Terre, and now, my sort-of employer, Andreas invited me to a green expo in Bologna.

This is one of the Italian green wall product on display at the expo... It's a pretty standard product.

And this is Andreas my boss (although probably he wouldn't call himself that way), and his new vintage toothpaste.

Bologna second hand market at San Stefano

A sweet accordion player who has a good smile... I was listening to her under Bologna's endless porticoes as I wait for Gabri to come out of the Sunday mass.

Gabri!

Delllicious pasta with fiori di zucca and mussels!!!

Sidenote: Coming back to Italy makes me realize how photogenic the country really is. It is easy to take good pictures of Italy and blog about it. Perhaps it's is because their medieval-renaissance culture places strong emphasis on axially oriented design? Anyhow; something in the way the city is laid made it measuredly scenic, even on my tiny point-n-shoot camera. This is in contrast to Munich, which is a wonderful city to live in, and by far a more comfortable place to walk around at... but, I have yet to take good pictures of it. Without those gigantic d-slr that has wide apertures, the pictures I take here look so flat and banal. Munich really is a nice place to be, and deserve more blog notes than it currently has.

Augustenstraße 93, Munich

It's been a week since I reached Munich. For most of the time, I have been sick. As a result, I am resting lots at home, my new apartment room at Augustenstraße. I like where I live now. It's only 15 minutes to walk to work, and the street is full of grocery shops. From normal groceries, discounted netto groceries, organic groceries, bath and health products, Asian shop, Bollywood shops. All in all, I pass by 7 groceries, 4 bakeries (and a McDonalds) every morning on the way to the office.


My favorite shop is this one, a second-hand english bookshop that has a generous number of cozy sofas tucked away in its bookish corners~

Millesgården

Malmö in 24h

On Monday, my boss told me that I don’t need to come to the all day office meeting on Tuesday. In fact, if I do come, I’ll be put to work somewhere else anyway. Great. That doesn’t sound like a promising day. Might as well take a Swedish style holiday then.

I’ve wanted to go to Malmo since I came here, but the occasion and the price never seemed right. Malmo is 4 hours and 30 minutes away, so a day trip is kinda rushing it, but because of this last minute holiday (and fears of futureregrets) I decided to go now. After all, once I depart from Sweden, there is no telling when I will return again!

I called Stina, who is by now in Malmo, and luckily she is there and I can stay over at her place! Yay!

Weekday price are lower than weekends, and last minute tickets are even cheaper. At about 14:50, I booked an SJ train ticket, packed my stuff, and ran home to get change (and of course, toothbrush). I brought some sushi for dinner on the rail, and I departed at 17:40,cheduled to return on 17:38 on the next day to pick up Liana from the flygbussarna at 18:00.

Unfortunately, in all the rush, I brought my camera but forgot about my camera battery. So, I have no camera to take picture of Malmo right now, but I got my laptop, and here’s the mac’s photo booth shot of me in the train:


Now this is written on Monday, from the train from Stockholm to Malmo. There was pay-internet at the train, but even without purchasing any connection time, you can see the exact position of your train! Wahoow! It’s like an airplane!

Update: I borrowed Stina's camera, so when I get the pictures from her in the coming weeks, I can post them later!

Alingsås

The long Swedish summer holiday means that there's a lot of delayed projects, and as a result, there's no major construction around for me to participate in while I'm at Green Fortune Stockholm. Luckily this project came up. I was not there for the fabric and irrigation mounting, but I was there for the day-long planting of the wall.This wall is located in Alingsås, a small town in west of Sweden, some 4 hours by the train from Stockholm, and it is placed in the newly renovated waiting room for the Alingsås hospital. The wall is about 10 meters square, and we planted some 220 plants, including philodendron, nephrolepis, hedera, monstera, etc. (see the planting schedule up there?) The wall looks a little empty for now, but in time, the plants will grow, cover the wall, and look nice like the other ones!

It was a long day, and to describe everything would be an overkill. So here's the dot point summary:
4:15, woke up.
5:04, goes to office to fetch Gustav and the perlites.
6:10, took the train.
10:00, arrived at the hospital.
11:30, started planting the monsteras at the bottom.
13:00, lunch.
14:00, proceeds with the herdera...
15:00, sweated under the superbright bulbs...
16:00, finished planting. Clean up time!
17:40 Swept the last traces of soil off the floor.
18:30, took the train back
23:00, arrived in Stockholm.
24:00 mignight, home again.

Work!

Just not to lead you on the wrong impression that I am holidaying in Europe, here are some pictures of my colleagues and what we do up here in Sweden. I mainly travel on weekends, and I actually go to work nine-to-five everyday. Most of the time, I am working on sketchup renderings for the company project, but every now and then, I get to do my green wall study and go on a maintenance trip with Louise or Anna.



Above is of Louise doing the maintenance at Halsotek (a medical center). Theirs is the oldest plantwall the company has in town (2.5 years old), and it has ivies taking root and breaching the structural wall behind it. And below is Anna doing maintenance pruning on the 7 meter plant wall at the Neurological department of Karolinska Institute. When you are up there with the ladder, the wall is higher than you think!




Here am I doing a night maintenance (9pm!) using the 4 meter scissor... because of the leverage, controlling an object 4 meters high is not that easy! I had a difficult time preventing myself from getting swayed by the scissor and stumbling down on the stairs. This office is the only place that I know of in downtown Stockholm that opens until 12 midnight. It's a law firm (you budding law students out there, your life isn't that much of a different than that of an architect!).

And I don't have the picture of Hans and Johan, who owns the Green Fortune office that I am interning for right now. There's something odd about taking the picture of your employer in working situations. Maybe some other time.

Paris - A Noon's Alley

There is a path behind the Cathedral of Notre Dame
that exists only on clear cloudless noons.
When the leaves of the horsechesnuts are at its shadiest,
a stream of sunlight is shaped by its hands
and it falls on the sand.

The path quivers in the wind,
disappears under the clouds.
Walk only on this light, and at its end,
you will find a different world than where you began.




So goes the story of the path in my imagination. People often talk about paths under the moonlight, but how about those created by the sunlight? Can it be just romantic, a secret walk in broad daylight?
I think it would make a nice material for a children's book one day, so I made sketch: perhaps the two children are using the momentary path of sunlight to reach another world... or perhaps just another playground.

Paris -Rue Jean de Beauvais

This is is going to be a messy rambling about my visit to Paris from three weeks ago...

So, this is my favorite street in Paris. Actually, it is the type of street that I liked the most out of my wanderings in Europe. It's a small, pedestrian only, slightly sloped cobblestone path, set between flat façade stone buildings, with fine pinnate leafed trees set in symmetrical arrangement. When I first saw it, I felt that I have seen this kind of street before (which turns out to be at Placa de Tossal in Valencia, Spain). From an urban planning vantage point, this is a very efficient street that does multiple things at once: it deals with a steep change in gradation, it provides an environment where people can gather and socialize (at the café), it has space for urban greenery, which in turns gives the street a "cathedral-like" effect (with its sun-bathed leaves), it creates a courtyard for the people living in the building and... it's simply darn pleasant to be in a street like this.

I stood there for a while to sketch, and wondered what is the secret to this intimate street? As a larchie Living this modern and car-invaded cities, I want to make a street like this. A calming street, a kind of street that makes you forget the worries of your daily life, and enjoy the sound of the leaves rustling in the wind. A kind of street that makes your transitory passage feels homey and comfortable precisely because it is an ephemeral experience.

An ideal street, a magical street,
the kind that mostly exist only in children's book.


Speaking of literature... places like this reminds me of the mythical café under the trees that are conjured up by Zeráfiel's poems. If only I can tell him, how haunting his words continues to be.

"What was said I have forgotten already
as the sun falls into the grasp of the tree,
leaving shadows across empty cups of coffee."

Crayfishing at Stjärnsund

It's been a while since I blogged... there seems to be so much to record, but not so much to tell. Well, forget Paris for now. This is better.


I was lucky to invited by Stina to visit her hometown in Stjärnsund a small (300-person) village, 2 hours north of Stockholm. I arrived in the evening, right after work. We had dinner at her home and then her family took me out on a crayfishing trip with their friends, the family of Anders. Anders' house is right by the lake and they own a motor boat that they have used for crayfishing for decades.

We set out on the boat around 9pm, right before sunset, when the pink moon starts rising over the horizon. We 'drove' (went with the motorboat) to their traditional spot by a small island, and then turned off the motor that is driving the boat. Then anders took two wooden paddles, and we slowly approach the white styrofoam floaties that mark the location of the crayfish trap that Anders and Classe (Stina's dad) under the water in the afternoon.

Now, this white floaties have a long string attached to it, and as we wound that string, we pull the crayfish trap cage from the bottom of the lake...




Then you take the collect crayfish out into a bucket. And here is Classe with one of the crayfish. He has to hold the creature from its tail so not to get pinched by their red claws.


After we emptied the cages, we'd put more fresh fish baits in, and lowered the traps again, which is to be collected on the next morning. In the mean time, we keep the crayfishes alive in the bathtub overnight. Remember, they have to be boiled alive!


The next morning at about 8am, we set our boats again to collect more crayfish! Here you can see how calm the lake water is, and you can see the sky on its reflection. And about that fake owl there, it bobs its head up and down along with the swaying of the floating wooden deck. It's set there to scare away the sparrows from pooping on the deck.


It was a warm fine day, as warm as it gets in the part of Sweden, and I took some short videos where you can see how the crayfishes are lifted up from the water and taken out of its cages.






Here is Stina pulling another crayfish cage. In total, with one night and one morning outing, we caught 133 crayfish with ten cages, out of which, 35 are small (less than 10cm, so we had to return them to the lake). The catch for different cages varies by location. We had one cage that caught none, while another cage got 19!




A little about the crayfishing tradition. In Sweden, the crayfish party is a special traditional celebration marking the end of summer. The crayfishes maybe abundant in local waters all year round, but because the risk of overfishing, when, how and how much you can fish these delicacy is highly regulated. You cannot fish these delicacies most of the year, but the first weekend of August marks the beginning of the crayfish season where people who own land by the lake, can legally fish them. Not every Swede gets a chance to crayfish every summer, so I was pretty lucky to be invited into one.

The part I find amazing about this system that, these legal frameworks do work, people do report the crayfish they got and return the smaller crayfish to the lake, and as a result, the population of these sought-after creatures are pretty stable. Oh, and its worth noting too that the crayfish they have in Sweden is Canadian crayfish. Most of the local crayfishes died a few decades ago because of a fungal disease outbreak.


And this is Mr. Crayfish with his feisty red pincers! And you can see Anders at the behind him. Soon, Mr. Crayfish and friends will be boiled alive, with some dill, salt and pepper! Yummmms!!!



And the crayfish party is not complete without the toast, cheese, beer and... schnapps! And songs too! Lots of traditional Swedish songs that I don't know what it means but sounds good anyways~ I think we should sing more at parties!