wuthering heights

last week i went to stockholm to do an interview for filmamasoner (to come up next week), and to see a concert with kaizers orchestra in the evening. in between i had a couple of hours left over, so i went to the movies to see wuthering heights. what an experience! it really exhausted me. i love movies that influence me so, they are the most fascinating films to see. read my review on moving landscapes.

moving landscapes

as i have said earlier, i have started a new blog a couple of weeks ago, and now i feel finally ready to give you a link. moving landscapes is my blog where i will focus on film, litterature, theatre, opera and everything else withing the broad field of culture that finds my interest. since i intend moving landscapes to serve as a kind of portfolio in future jobapplications, i write foremost in swedish, but please feel free to use google translator if you don't understand the language!

i have also started to write for a brandnew, until now still unofficial, norwegian webmagazine called filmamasoner. it is an online filmmagazine with a focus on women, both as filmmakers and as an audience. my articles will be found both there and on moving landscapes.

of course i will continue to blog here as usual, with pictures form the apartment, the occasional outfit and stuff i bought and stuff i like.

more kitchen

finishing an apartment takes time. with the help of my brother who visited last week, i put up a couple of posters:



the keep calm poster was a present and can be found in many shapes and sizes on etsy. the poster on the top is actually a vintage kitchen towel, and the one underneath with a print of scandinavian design classics is also from etsy.

this clock finally saw the light of day again after having been confined to a moving box for about two years.



and last but not least: a selfmade calendar with postcards from ikea, next to our wine-rack on the kitchen wall.

beautiful books

part two in my birthday wish blog series. i love reading, but mostly i go for the cheapest available possibility. paperback, second hand, library. however, i really like books with beautiful covers, so why not make a wish for some more precious editions?





penguin launched a wonderful edition of clothbound classics. coralie bickford-smith designed the most beautiful covers i have ever seen, and i wouldn't mind having all the jane austen novels, or the dickens novels, or the whole series, standing in my bookshelves.



yes, this poster is a whole book to put on your wall and read it there. it also is a piece of art to admire every day, and i think it would fit perfectly over our sofa in the living room.

by:Larm 2012: ane brun

i took some time off from everyday life to travel to oslo. visit friends, see an opera, volunteer for by:Larm once again. by:Larm is the perfect rock/pop/music festival for me: it is very well organised, takes extremely good care of their volunteers, everything is indoors, and the concerts are so short that it doesn't matter if one or two of them are not as expected - you can just leave to see something else.

one of my best moments there was the beginning of ane brun's show at kulturkirken jakob. together with magnus renfors (who had earlier worked together with roy andersson on "du levande"), she had produced "one", a short film musical based on four of her new songs, which had premiered a little earlier this year at gothenburg international film festival. the film was screened on a reflective glass plate standing in front of jakob kirke's old altar painting. the juxtaposition of the film's bleak aesthetics to the dark, warm colours of the painting made the experience quite magical, intensified by the church's wonderful acoustics.

you could say that the film shows a poetic circus, with bleak colours and strange props. it circles around suffering and death, but also the wonders of life and creativity. her video for "do you remember" is part of the film:



if you ever have the chance to see "one" as a whole, i heartily recommend it.

a new tea pot

ever since the day after christmas, my favourite person in the world keeps asking me what i want to have for my birthday - which is in april. so i thought i'd come up with some kind of wishlist which i'll put up on the blog.

first out: a new teapot. considering the amounts of tea that i drink, and the pleasure i take in sipping my tea, it feels strange to only have two teapots, of which one actually is designed for coffee rather than tea.


pretty triangles by ferm living




this traditional white one by höganäs would probably hold twice as much as the one i use right now. perfect for having tea with friends! (they also have very nice bowls and plates... just mentioning)





fine little day has, together with anna backlund, designed some wonderful porcelain for a new label called rym. their mix-and-match concept is wonderful - and i would love one of those teapots (maybe the one with the black pattern, or the pattern with the wooden triangles? or the pattern called "tissage" on the cup in the front?). and maybe one or two mix-matched cups and saucers...

bedroom

we have two new friends in our bedroom. a nightstand that we got for free when our neighbour moved away. she also loved vintage stuff. furniture and china and kitchen details from the 50s and 60s.



and a cupboard for t-shirts and jeans and pullovers and skirts that don't need hanging up. we got it second hand and it was rather expensive, but i love the decorative details, the colour and the fact that it is old and has been around for a long time. it is made of solid wood, and i think we will have it forever. considering that, it probably wasn't so expensive.





doesn't it look pretty? it's all in the details, i think.

kitchen

that we have a new apartment in the new city in the new country seems like a wonder. to call the rental market in the greater stockholm area a disaster would be an understatement. if you want to rent an apartment in sweden you have to either queue for a couple of years (in stockholm and uppsala that would be 10-15 years for a decent place to live in) or rent "second hand". that means that you rent from somebody who rents, but doesn't need their apartment for a couple of months or a bit more.



we were unlucky and got to experience the worst part of the housing situation first hand: the stress on the rental market benefits frauds like nothing else. not only did we lose a lot of money, we also went through a couple of more than stressful weeks looking for a solution. knowing that i'll be homeless in a week's time was one of the worst feelings i have experienced so far. thankfully, vackra-kläder-joanna offered us her old apartment in the south of stockholm and let us live there during november. joanna, you are an angel!



now we rent a wonderful apartment (second hand for 1,5 years) with a huge kitchen (the pictures show some details) and lovely neighbours, and i have started looking for a job. i take one step at a time, and rather slowly as well. there are not that many positions out there at the moment. until the end of the month i get unemployment benefits from norway, but we'll manage well even if i don't find work immediately. things start to look brighter - and the sun shines a little longer each day.

green box

not only do we have new apartment in a new city (uppsala) in a new country (sweden), we also started a new life concerning what we eat: we ordered a "green box". which means that every wednesday we get a large box with ecologically grown veggies and fruit delivered right to our door. it greatly reduces the schlep-factor in grocery shopping, is not much more expensive than buying regular vegetables at a supermarket, the quality is higher and we even get information about where our happy apples grew up.



so far we have only tested it for one week, but i'm really happy about it. we get three different sorts of fruit and six sorts of veggies (whereof usually at least one kind of sallad) and i try to come up with fun recipes to use them. i would say that each week there will probably be at least one fruit or vegetable that i usually wouldn't buy or have never bought until now. definitely challenging!



another good thing is that come summer we'll try out the completely swedish box - not only organically but even completely locally grown. i have to admit that with all the beets and roots during winter it is just not as attractive for us right now. we really don't like beets. at all.

for those of you living in sweden, we order lilla mixlådan from ekolådan. i'm sure there are similar offers in germany and lots of other countries. check it out!

edit: in germany you can google "grüne kiste" to find out if there is a service like this close to where you live. i also did a quick search for "vegetable subscription" and there seem to be a couple of programs in the states as well as in great britain.

new city, new apartment, new life

everything is kind of new. even though we already moved in the beginning of last november, i feel like we only moved here just at new year.

a new country, new city, new apartment, new life.



the last half year has drained me completely, i lost all my energy and initiative, and the last thing i felt like was blogging. even though i formulated ideas for blogposts at least three or four times a week, i just couldn't sit down and write, much less for the world to read.

but now. i started a new blog (which i will link to in due time) but really want to blow life into this old one again. the new one will be more work and less life. this is more life and less work. at least that's the general idea.

oslo, 22.07.2011

things like this only happen elsewhere.

suddenly everything seems unreal.

the silence after the blow is uncanny. eerie.

i'm ok, i think.

back from paris

last saturday we came back from paris. we rented a wonderful tiny apartment (found here via nano) close to the gare du nord, and enjoyed our time there tremendously, despite the weather being mostly cloudy and rainy.



in no particular order or preference, we did indulge in the following:

we...
* ate (and bought) lots of good cheese
* drank lots of cheap wine (we found a fantastic wine bar in montmartre)
* took a trip up the eiffel tower and felt seasick 300m up in the air
* drank tea and bought macarons at ladurée
* took a tour on the canal (which was mostly nice, but rather longish due to dubble-locks and other obstacles such as unlifted bridges taking lots of time)
* ate lots of croissants for breakfast
* drank more wine
* bought perfume, a green beret and kusmi tea as souvenirs



* visited the louvre and stared at the masses staring at mona lisa (however, i was amazed by the raft of the medusa. it really was as awe-inspiring as i thought it would be.)
* visited notre dame and sacre coeur
* got engaged on our 5th anniversary in a little park on montmartre
* ate lots of fantastic french food (there were two amazing restaurants just around the corner from where we stayed, called Chez Michel and Chez Casimir - i heartily recommend both of them!)
* saw the kubrick exhibition at the cinematheque francaise (best exhibition i saw in a long time)

june afternoon

on the first june weekend, my favourite person and i went on a walk to explore the neighbourhood. there are lots of lovely old buildings, with ornaments and greenery on the facade. since oslo consists of more than just a few mountains, quite a number of those houses are built into steep hillsides, with staircases in between. when walking up one of those flights of stairs, we found this hidden side-entrance:







we also came across a couple of really old lilac trees, and i couldn't resist climbing one of them.





skirt and socks: h&m
t-shirt: monki
bag: vintage
shoes: dinsko

off to paris

when you read this we're off to paris, to celebrate our 5th anniversary.



in no particular order or preference, we thought we would indulge in the following:

eat lots of good cheese
drink lots of cheap wine
see the eiffel tower
eat lots of macarons
take a tour on the canal
eat lots of croissants
drink more wine
sniff some perfume
visit the louvre
sit in nice parks
eat lots of baguette
see the kubrick exhibition at the cinematheque francaise
buy kusmi tea

i'm sure it's going to be a splendid trip!

pina

a movie i long to see.

PINA - Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost - International Trailer from neueroadmovies on Vimeo.