Johanna Writes

Tokyo Made

Wow! Check out Tokyo Made- a fabulous new site dedicated to Japanese designers and their products. Go there and browse around and then buy buy buy!

Bonjour?

Hello? Is there anybody out there? I'm still here although I feel as though I've fallen off the edge of the planet. It's amazing what a few weeks in a tiny studio apartment in a tiny swiss village without friends, childcare, internet or television can do to a person. We've finally found an apartment in Lausanne but we won't be able to move in until the middle of March. If I don't go stark raving mad before then, I'll probably be able to write more in a few weeks. On the other hand, if I can continue being able to high jack this wireless connection and use this borrowed laptop, perhaps I'll be able to fill you in on a few of the thrilling details of my daily life here amongst the Swissters before then. Like for example, yesterday we went to a little village called Murten in the Swiss German part of the country. I'm convinced that this is the town where everyone in Switzerland goes to get their hair cut because in the old town alone, I counted no less than 15 hair stylists in a three block radius. Basically, it's a walled city of beauty salons. It was very charming, filled with what some people call cobblestones but which I'm come to privately think of as brimstones. Actually I don't know what brimstones even are but I know that they're very very bad and I also know that any sort of stone that causes a 21 month old toddler to fall and wail approximately once every 10 feet is a very bad sort of stone indeed. You may think of them as quaint and picturesque but anyone who's ever wiped the equivalent of five buckets of snot and blood off a child's face after they've tripped for the umpteenth time knows better. Aside from the hair salons and the brimstones and the adorable rooftops, there's not a lot else to report on this trip. Oh, except that staying in our room at the Adler Hotel was sort of like what it would be like to stay in a room where Chagall had gone and had a complete nervous breakdown. The room was completely covered in painted cows and wine bottles. This unfortunate decor was then weirdly contrasted by the stark white and tubular bathroom which would have been more at home in say, a submarine. Watching Thomas the Train in German while sitting on big fluffy feather bed under a huge green and purple cow was quite naturally the highlight of the voyage. I can't believe I almost forgot to mention it.

P.S. To my friends and family- please don't think I'm being rude by not writing or responding to emails. I rarely have more than a minute or two at a time on a computer so my generally sluggish rate of correspondence has been slowed down to an abrupt halt, at least for now.