Meanwhile, in Osaka…

Japan. Evening. Sayonara.

Just a little while ago I was sipping on a glass of Suntory Soda in our hotel room’s small bathtub. Lying there, I was contemplating our trip how much fun we’d had and all the great food we’d enjoyed. Clearly the most enjoyable trip to Japan so far. And the most affordable. The weak yen makes even the weaker Swedish crown stretch quite far.

Before my bath, we had enjoyed a delicious dinner just a few hundred meters from the airport hotel where we were staying tonight. We’ve got an early flight heading southwest tomorrow, so no Osaka this time around.

For most airport restaurants that I’ve ever visited, this principle applies: not good but expensive.

Tonight’s meal offered the opposite: a delightful dinner for a reasonable price: 185 SEK/person, including a large draft beer each (served, as usual, in chilled mugs).

We couldn’t think of any of our meals in Japan that we hadn’t described with at least one superlative followed by an exclamation mark. Even the convenience store food we’ve had a couple of times has been surprisingly tasty.

Will miss Japanese food. And the heated Japanese toilet seats.

But also the Japanese politeness, friendliness, modesty, and honesty.

There is still a deep-seated sensibility here. But also anxiety or reservation that I think we from Sweden both recognize and quite appreciate. At least people of our generation probably feel that way.

Here, you are treated (and judged) based on how you behave, especially us foreigners, the so-called “Gaijin.” I haven’t bowed so much in a long time. But it felt natural to respond to politeness with at least as much politeness.

Yesterday we ate at Jam, one of Okinawa’s many teppanyaki restaurants where a skilled chef cooks your food in front of you on a massive steel grill.

The first time I had Japanese food was in the mid-1980s seated along a teppanyaki table at Mikado in Gothenburg. Mikado was located above White Corner at that time if anyone remembers that place.

There was a lot of showmanship yesterday, but the chef also made really good food, and the drinks at Jam were not watered down. We even had a bit of interaction with the family from Nagano sitting next to us.

After dinner, everyone around the teppanyaki table was ushered to the restaurant’s lounge area where dessert was served (ice cream and green tea).

It took a while, but the Nagano family couldn’t resist and approached us a bit shyly, asking if they could take a group photo with us in it. We agreed, of course. Much chatter and laughter ensued!

I think it was a full moon as we walked back to the hotel at Moon Beach on Okinawa late last night.

Right now, here in Osaka, it’s raining (not to be confused with Åsaka, where my grandfather Eskil comes from). But it looks like it will be sunny in Bangkok tomorrow afternoon…

Sayonara, Japan, and thanks for a couple of magical weeks!

It sounds strange, but when I’m in Tokyo, I think about Trollhättan, the city where SAAB cars were once made and where I spent formative time with my grandparents as a youngster.

Let me explain.

For about a year, sometime in the early 1970s, I lived with my grandparents Eskil and Agnes Andersson on Örtagårdsvägen 17 in Trollhättan. At the beginning of this nearly year-long stay with them, communication between my grandfather and me was pretty much impossible. His English vocabulary was just as limited as my Swedish. Grandmother Agnes was no linguist, but she had studied basic English at night school for a few semesters.

When my grandfather and I shared breakfasts, there was often silence at the kitchen table. The only sound was the loud slurping noise when my grandfather ate his thick morning porridge or drank coffee from the saucer with a sugar cube between his teeth. He had already done an hour’s work on the farm before sitting down to have breakfast with me.

Grandma Agnes always had a lot to do in the mornings and rarely took the time to eat with us.

After breakfast, my grandfather would retreat to his study, carefully cutting out the TV schedule from the last page of the local newspaper. With his thick, rough fingers holding a black ink pen, he would circle the television shows he planned to watch that evening.

Eskil Andersson was born in 1901 and was not an educated man. I don’t think he had more than six years of schooling. On the other hand, he was very practical, curious, and eager to learn.

He followed the news on TV, listened to the radio, and meticulously read both the regional paper “Göteborgs-Posten” and the farmer’s specialty magazine “Land”.

He never touched grandmother’s stack of weekly magazines. I, on the other hand, enjoyed them for their cartoons. My favorite was “Året Runt” (Year Around), where the cartoon about the delightful anti-hero “Mister Kronblom” was published.

On weekdays, when my grandfather returned from either farming, the stable, or the smithy in the evening, we had dinner together with my grandmother.

If I didn’t have any homework, we would meet again just before the news program “Rapport” aired in his study, where the TV was placed at the far end of a disproportionally large wooden desk (which, as I recall, was covered with light veneer).

There, my grandfather always sat in his creaky, semi-circular wooden chair with armrests and squeaky wheels. He reached the TV’s volume knob and channel selector (two buttons, one for each channel) by grabbing the desk and pulling himself along the floor.

Once he’d found the right program and adjusted the volume level (he was hard of hearing even back then), he pushed the chair back across the floor, took out his pipe, stirred the burnt tobacco in the bowl with an old match, tapped out the ash, and pressed a fresh pinch of Borkum Riff or John Silver into the pipe.

Then Grandpa lit the tobacco with a new match, leaned back in his chair, took a puff, and exhaled smoke through both his nose and one corner of his mouth. I remember being completely fascinated by his pipe ritual.

During these TV evenings with my grandfather, my grandmother would come in after a while with a bowl of carrot sticks or sliced winter apples for me to snack on.

By then, Grandpa’s study was already filled with smoke, and despite being asthmatic, I really liked the scent of tobacco fumes. Today, whenever I see someone with a pipe or smell the aroma of pipe tobacco, my thoughts immediately go back to those lovely moments with my grandfather Eskil.

Ok. Let’s move on to the connection between Tokyo and Trollhättan.

During lunch break one Friday at Lyrfågelskolan in Trollhättan, the school I attended for a semester, the boys in my class were enthusiastically chatting about a monster movie that would be shown on TV later that evening.

I, of course, wanted to see that movie, but I thought it would be difficult to persuade my grandfather to skip the news at 9:00 PM and instead watch “Destroy All Monsters” with “Gojira” (ゴジラ) aka “Godzilla” in the lead role over on the other of Sweden’s two channels.

When I came home in the afternoon with my blue gym bag over my shoulder, I went straight to my grandfather’s study to check which tv shows he had marked for the evening. To my delight, I saw that “Destroy All Monsters” was circled several times, and that the news show “Aktuellt” was even crossed out!

It was later that Friday evening that my then seventy-something grandfather Eskil and I were introduced to Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, King Ghidorah, Angilas, Minya, and Spiega. And to the city of Tokyo and the mighty Mount Fuji, where part of the film’s exciting plot unfolded.

Here in Okinawa, we don’t hear sirens from police or fire trucks as much as we did in Tokyo last week. But there and then, I often associated those alarming sounds with the old Godzilla movies. And above all, to that very first one that my grandfather and I watched together on the outskirts of Trollhättan back in the early 1970s.

Tokyo. Japan. Evening. Dark (again).

I’m writing this from a minimalist folding table at one end of our tiny but brilliantly designed hotel room. A half-eaten, triangular-shaped egg and tuna sandwich lies untouched on the right side of the computer’s slightly crumbly keyboard.

I just bought the aforementioned, beautifully packaged sandwich at our nearest Lawson (a more luxurious, cleaner, and neater variant of 7/11), where the friendly staff now seems to recognize us after our daily visits. Right now, both Charlotte and I are exhausted and have stocked up for a cozy Sunday evening here in our “incubator” on the 10th floor.

We were provided with plenty of sunshine today and it warmed our cheeks as we walked along the coast in Kanagawa. Kanagawa is probably best known for the woodcut with the great wave by the artist Hokusai.

With us for most of today’s adventure, almost like a painted backdrop, was the iconic Mt. Fuji.

When the commuter train we took from Tokyo Station rolled into the city of Fujisawa after just 40 minutes of travel, we walked with eager steps through the pedestrian street and quickly over the bridge to the island of Enoshima.

Once we had climbed the 254 steep steps to the island’s highest temple area and taken the elevator to the top deck of the observation tower, we were rewarded with a classic view: the sea in the foreground and the almost unbelievably symmetrical, snow-covered Mt. Fuji in the background.

I think we fell in love with Tokyo in 2006 when we were here to shoot and gather impressions for half a dozen travel articles and guides about the Japanese capital for several Swedish travel magazines.

I vividly remember that we scuttled between Shinjuku, Shibuya, Harajuku, Ginza, Asakusa, and Roppongi to gather impressions and visual material. We almost had to buy extra luggage space to bring all the inspiration with us after that visit!

The relationship with Tokyo was strengthened on our next visit in 2015, and now the feelings have come to life again… because just like almost 17 years ago, Tokyo is still incredibly awesome!

The city is grand and small-scale at the same time and always, always interesting: conventional-futuristic, ultra-commercial-meditative, minimalist-extravagant, and decently-perverse. A wonderful contradiction that gripped us then and still hasn’t let go.

Here, I can hardly put my phone down before it goes up again to film or shoot something that has caught my interest. Incidentally, this is the first time I’m in Japan without bringing any other camera than the one in my year-old phone.

Tokyo is still clean, fresh, well-organized, and extremely easy to navigate. Tokyoites are still friendly, polite, and considerate. Not all the new skyscrapers and high-rises are beautiful, but nothing in the city environment or anything else has been left to chance. Everything has its place, and public communication is rather overt than risking being misunderstood. Everything works!

Sure, the Japanese are only marginally better than Thais at stringing external power lines, and the noise level in the subway is sometimes a bit too high. But everything else works so unbelievably well – trains are on time, the mobile data network is super fast, the food is delightfully good and relatively cheap, and you never need to worry about being robbed, assaulted, or deceived.

The weather this November Sunday reminded us of a beautiful Swedish early summer day. After a couple of months of intense heat in Vietnam, it has been really great with Tokyo’s cooler autumn climate. Soon, we’re heading to the country’s southern islands with diving, surfing, and other activities on the agenda.

Sayonara!

We arrived early this morning at Narita International Airport outside of Tokyo, Japan. Since the Vietjet night flight from Saigon/HCMC wasn’t full, both Charlotte and I were able to grab and sleep (fetal position) in a three-seat space.

After checking in at our hotel and getting over the fact that our room is just marginally larger than our bathroom in Malmö, we headed to the nearest convenience store, a Lawson, where we bought all kinds of food to try out.

Top of my list was the above egg salad sandwich that Anthony Bourdain recommended during one of his show’s episodes filmed here in Japan. Unsurprisingly, it was really good. Tonight we’re having sushi with our travel buddy Erik at Sushi-Go-Round deep inside Tokyo Station.

Saturday. Evening. Da Nang. Dark.

Just like last weekend, Charlotte and I took a 10k walk on the beach on this beautifully sunny Saturday. We saw a gigantic jellyfish that had washed up on the shore. It literally lay there like a huge blob of jelly. Tried to feel sorry for it, but couldn’t. I had never seen such a large jellyfish before. Charlotte said it was one of the poisonous kinds.

Today’s stroll was the last for this revisit to Da Nang. Of all the things we’ve enjoyed during our over a month-long stay here, I will probably miss My Khe Beach the most. But soon, we’ll get to experience entirely new beaches… By the way, it’s my 80th day of sobriety. Feels good. One day at a time, right?

Still in awe of how improved My An Beach is compared with 2019. Back then, we alternated between two, maybe three different restaurants with decent food. Today, there are at least a dozen places. One of the best so far is Patakka, a beautifully decorated Indian restaurant a few doors down from our hotel. The owners, a sweet Indian couple from the UK, guided us through their menu’s various options, and, then while we waited for our delicious meal to arrive, they shared their inspiring story about how they ended up in Da Nang which you can read about by visiting their website here.

Photo: Matts René.

Sunday. Evening. Da Nang. Drizzle.

On June 6, 1942, barely half a year after the Japanese Air Force left Pearl Harbor in a hellish inferno, my father was drafted into the U.S. Army with serial number 13073307 stamped on his shiny Dog Tag.

After a few months of boot camp in Baltimore, Maryland, the 21-year-old Private Ernest Raboff was shipped to Europe. For the rest of World War II, my father was a war reporter for “Stars and Stripes,” the U.S. Armed Forces’ daily newspaper.

On August 24, several weeks after D-Day, Paris was liberated from the German occupation. Among the 800,000 American, British, and Canadian soldiers, not to forget the French resistance “Free French 2nd Armored Division,” was also a skinny journalist from Philadelphia, Private Ernest Raboff.

My father stayed in Europe after the end of the war, and in the spring of 1946, he sat with some friends in the bar at Café de Flore in Paris. On a barstool a little further away sat a couple of young Swedish women who had recently arrived in town.

Just like many other Swedes after the war, the girls had traveled from Sweden to Paris to be inspired by the various creative expressions of French culture. Perhaps they were also looking to meet a handsome partner in uniform.

Before the evening was over at Café de Flore, one of the girls and my father had taken a liking to each other, and eventually, they became a couple.

After some time in Paris, the newly engaged traveled to the Swedish capital and lived there for a few years. In Stockholm, my father wrote a lot of poetry, perhaps to process all that he had seen and experienced during the war. In 1950, N.O. Mauritzons published his poetry collection, “The Bridge Across Turbulent Times.”

A few days ago, I received an unusual email from an American woman. In the email, I learned that she was in the process of going through her deceased brother’s estate in the house where he had lived in New Hampshire.

Among her brother’s belongings was a collection of books from the time when their mother, Countess Nahida de Comminges (1864-1960), had lived in an apartment just a few blocks from Café de Flore in Paris.

Among all the books was the poetry collection, “The Bridge Across Turbulent Times.” The book was dedicated to the Countess and signed by my father.

The Countess’s granddaughter, the woman who contacted me the other day, and who is also named Nahida, wondered if I wanted her to send my father’s book to me.

Why am I mentioning all this?

Well, because this story nicely highlights why I am so obsessed with making books. A book is a bit like a message in a bottle. Suddenly, it appears on some unknown beach, discovered by some unknown person.

Right now, I am working on a book about what it’s like to turn 60. Yes, about everything that entails both emotionally and physically. It’s as difficult as it gets but no less exciting to sort thoughts and structure them in essay form.

Just the thought that this new book (or any of the others) will continue to live on long after my time on this planet is kinda cool.

Think about it; someone in the future might contact Elle’s children or grandchildren and wonder if they are possibly related to the author of a book they found in a creaky drawer, on a dusty bookshelf, or in a moving box that was never unpacked. That thought warms the soul.

It also makes me want to continue making more books!

I am easily distracted and this seems to be getting worse as I get older. This is not just a little ironic as I’m currently writing a book about how life changes when you’re over sixty and how easily distracted I’ve become.

When I’m sitting and writing in a busy café, like the one above where I was earlier today for several hours, there’s always a plethora of potential distractions (guests, music, food, staff). Yet oddly enough, I found that I was still actually able to focus on writing there – even for stretches that are several minutes long.

Wait, only for several minutes, you ask?

Well, yeah, as what I’m writing constantly takes me places that need to be investigated, researched and cross-referenced before being added to the book’s pages. At some point within the next two months, I’ll be able to spend most of my time editing, which I’m very much looking forward to.

Here’s the yummylicious Sunday eveniung dinner I had at our favorite restaurant in Da Nang at the plant-based, health-focused Roots:

Japanese Nori Bowl: veggie nori roll, wakame, edamame, shiso, grated dikon, pickled ginger, turmeric tofu, mushroom, pumpkin seeds, cucumber, sesame, garlic black rice with ginger & sesame dressing.

We’re once again finding our way into an everyday groove here in Vietnam. Just a few short steps from our hotel we found a laundry service and there’s a plethora of restaurants within a five minute walk that serve delicious and affordable meals from almost any conceivable cuisine.

If I had to bet, I’d wager that our combined expenditure for food and beverages doesn’t exceed SEK 200/USD$18 per day. And I am confident that if we only ate at local Vietnamese restaurants and didn’t splurge on fancy coffee, we’d easily get by on half that much.

Our favorite dinnertime place today, as back in 2019, is the plant-based eatery Roots. So far, we’ve not found a better alternative where the food is so consistently well-made and tasty.

Wherever we travel, I rely on Charlotte’s ability to hone in and suss out which cafés that offer a) stable and fast Internet connection, b) good food/coffee and c) reasonably comfortable seating.

Like most days back when we were here in 2019, between 6:00-7:00 am this morning, I practiced Tai-Chi and Qigong together with Garry and his regulars on the beach. Then I headed to the My An Sports Center for a 1000 meter swim.

After getting in my morning exercise, I’ll spend most of this Sunday writing and editing a chapter in my book. That is, unless we decide to go to Da Nang’s war museum which we missed last time around.