Charlotte captured this during last night’s delicious dinner here in Umeda, Osaka, Japan. We ate at the same place I’d frequented several times during my visit in January. Osaka was chilly then, but now it’s perfect weather, around 18–23 °C. Like a nice Swedish summer.

After a month of photography in Bangkok’s relentless heat and humidity, it’s bliss to work in cool air for a while – like going from sauna to sea, so to speak.

While here in Osaka, we’ll focus on Umeda, Dōtonbori, the cozy, artsy alleys of Nakazakichō I checked out earlier this year, and Nakatsu, which Time Out just crowned one of the world’s coolest neighborhoods.

Lucky us: the yen has slipped another ~10% since the start of the year. The Swedish krona is practically grinning like the U.S. dollar over here – weird and wonderful in equal measure.

Our first visit to the “Land of the Rising Sun” was 15 years ago, when we were on assignment for two Swedish travel magazines (Aftonbladet Resa and Allt om Resor). We ended up with five or six features covering everything from food and love hotels to Roppongi’s nightlife and the trendy streets of Harajuku.

Elle was with us back then and was just as enthusiastic as we were, and everything the Japanese cuisine offered – delicious and varied – was devoured with a smile.

On the Thai Airways flight over, we shared a row with a friendly Japanese man our age who spoke fluent English after many years working in L.A. He looked a bit like Mr. Miyagi – wax on, wax off – and he even had a black belt in karate.

Fifth visit to Japan, and I’m still pleasantly surprised every time I rediscover the heated toilet seat – a true milestone of civilization if ever there was one.

Here in Umeda, our hotel room’s floor area is about a third of what we had during a month in Bangkok. On the other hand, it’s fitted with super-smart, high-quality solutions – perfect for compact living – so we don’t really miss anything except a bit of floor space and maybe a couple of extra hooks.

This trip will take us to four new cities (for us), which should result in several inspiring stories and at least one book filled with highlights from our Japanese adventures.

Stay tuned…

This man, maybe my age, maybe older, pushing a cart stacked with popcorn, was my only shot that entire day.

A livelihood on wheels.

As a popcorn buff, how could I not photograph this?

I love walking around Bangkok and letting serendipity hand me scenes worthy of an exposure or two. This city doesn’t curate itself or hand out ready-made Insta posts or viral TikToks. It offers relentless, gritty authenticity alongside sugar-coated promises and lofty dreams that swell and sweeten as the day wears into night.

I regret not buying a bag of the man’s popcorn.

Met a real-life leading lady at Siam Paragon the other day: Patravadi Mejudhon (aka Lek Patravadi) – the actress who so eloquently played Sritala, the resort owner in The White Lotus Season 3.

Ms Patravadi was graceful, gracious, and every bit as charming off-screen as she is on.

Bonus memory: during Siam Paragon’s inaugural week in December 2005, I was invited through a PR agency to be among the first to scuba dive in the mall’s giant aquarium Sea Life.

Yes, it was definitely surreal to dive with nurse sharks and other sea creatures while hundreds of young and old visitors to the aquarium checked me out from the other side of the thick glass. It was my first and only indoor scuba experience.
Photo credit: Charlotte Raboff

Everyday life on the east bank of the Chao Phraya – along Charoen Krung, through Talat Noi, past Song Wat and Chinatown – has held me in its spell for more than a decade.

In the warm climate of Southeast Asia, much of life flows outdoors. People rise with the coolness of dawn and gather again in the late afternoon and evening, when the sun settles and the heat dissipates.

Homes and family businesses blur at the threshold, sharing the same space, the same light, the same breath.

I couldn’t say what this elderly woman and her family sell. But the composition of the room – and the way it was lit – was too compelling not to capture.

Once photography had seduced me – the medium and the tools I use to make images – it changed my life forever. A pact formed between my mind and the camera, and it began to live a life of its own.

My eyes became stereoscopic viewfinders; I am constantly composing, always hunting for angles, perspectives, shapes, colours and contrasts.

It’s an involuntary, subconscious, almost autonomous response that fills every waking moment my eyes are open.

Not always, but mostly, it doesn’t feel like a choice when I take out my camera to catch something that for whatever reason intrigued me.

It’s part muscle memory – and the recurring need to verify (often many hours later, when reviewing what I shot) that the composition I saw with my eyes and in my mind was what I ended up getting.

I just published my new photography book with visual impressions from over 25 years of visiting Österlen in southeastern Skåne. There are some sample images from the book over here: www.raboff.com/osterlen-book

Don’t get me wrong – I love our Condo-by-the-Sea. Sixteen years of sunsets, sea breezes, morning and evening swims, and the occasional seagull serenade have etched themselves into my daily life. When we’re here, it’s home in every sense of the word.

And yet… I won’t – can’t – quit traveling. It’s what I’ve done professionally for the better part of my career as a working photographer – and for a couple of decades before that.

This year alone, I’ve checked into 19 hotels in six countries.

Part of this “habit” may have less to do with me and my addiction to hotels and more to do with my marriage and collaborations with Charlotte, my better half, who is an online entrepreneur. She eats, sleeps, and breathes hotels – particularly boutique hotels. Charlotte runs the popular site www.hoteladdict.se, which is basically her 24/7 addiction to all things hotels.

Still, I wonder: is it the surface-level allure – fresh sheets, tiny shampoo bottles, the anonymity of a room – or is it simply that I’ve aged out of hostels, guesthouses, and camping, and so travel and hotels are inherently inseparable?

Planes take you places – hotels embrace you once you’re there. They’re little cocoons of safety and comfort – sometimes an oasis when you’re visiting a bustling metropolis, sometimes even a safe house.

Maybe it’s the novelty – not knowing how a hotel will perform in relation to what we’ve read, whether glowing reviews are spot-on or wildly generous. Or whether someone forgot to mention the construction project next door… something that’s happened on a few occasions.

Whatever the reason, I’ve accepted that my urge–addiction, lust, call it what you will – for hotel living isn’t going away anytime soon.

And because every good confession deserves a list, here are five things I look for when booking a hotel:

1. Is the bed comfortable? Hotel beds are far from perfect, but they are usually decent. Nowhere near as comfortable as ours, though.

2. What’s in the minibar? A treasure chest of overpriced curiosities? Is there at least complimentary water?

3. How is the lobby? Equal parts catwalk, living room, and sociology experiment?

4. Is there a gym? These days, the hotel has to have a gym or at least be in the immediate proximity to a local gym.

5. Is there a co-working space? Is there a quiet space in the lobby, or can we borrow a conference room to work in?

   The image above is from a now-defunct hotel that we stayed in a few years ago in the legendary ski and spa resort Bad Gastein, way up in the Austrian Alps.

Lisbon is on my mind today. The news from the Elevador da Glória – a funicular we’ve ridden up and down that extremely steep, narrow cobblestone street between Restauradores and Bairro Alto – is heartbreaking. Lives lost, families changed forever.

Charlotte and I have lived and worked in Lisbon long enough to have enjoyed the city’s everyday hustle and bustle. But also the tiled facades, mornings that smelled of freshly ground coffee, the breeze coming off the river, evenings when that steep street came alive with excited voices bouncing off the ancient buildings that line it.

Because I’ve shared a little of Lisbon’s ordinary life, this tragedy lands deeper within me.

That’s why I believe travel matters. Not the checkbox kind. Rather slow travel with time spent, names learned, a few words of the language stumbled through, small routines adopted.

When we let a place get under our skin, empathy isn’t an idea anymore – it’s a reflex. We don’t mourn “the news”; we mourn people, streets, neighborhoods that feel familiar.

Hoje, sinto muito, Lisboa – today, I feel with you. May those lost be held in memory, and may the city I love find strength again.

I just came across this image in the Kockums Fabriker archive. I shot it in one of the many factory workshops I documented, most of which have since been obliterated. While it didn’t make it into the book Varvsstaden, all those stickers brought me back to the summer of 1988, when I worked as a dockworker unloading thousands of boxes of bananas in Göteborg’s harbor.

Each box weighed about 20 kg, and I typically unloaded between 1,500 and 2,000 boxes per day — the equivalent of roughly 30 to 40 tons of bananas each shift.

About a decade after that humbling summer job, Charlotte and I moved to Malmö – just as, coincidentally, the importation of bananas also shifted there.