A week later

It is hard to believe. A whole week has passed by. Time  flies. Everything is fun, and everyday we discover something new to get excited about.

But first thing first.

IKEA is wonderful! We are so lucky to be att Shim Misato. Mr. W and his Com&In team has taken us in and are letting us work with them. We started the week by helping out with the re arrangements at the lighting and framed pictures area. And by wednesday we had gotten a project for our selves. We are now re arrangeing some at the coat hangers and storrage department. At once we noticed the difference between Japan and Sweden. Really interesting experience! Tomorrow we are going to finish this projekt so the excitment is high! What are we going to do next!?

What about our everyday life?
Well...
The Jetlag is still going strong, because of the lack of sleep. Only around 4,5 hours a night. We come home very late, one of the reasons is Lala Port! It is a shopping mall next to IKEA. It is huge compared to the malls in Sweden! Everybody at IKEA laughs at us, they say it is a really small mall. ha ha ha.

Hello Kitty store:

In the eveing before we take the 10 minute long train ride to our hometown Shim Matsudo, we go to the big groceiry store to shop food. They cut the prise inhalf on all the fresh dinners before closing, so we eat good food for arount 300 yen (25 SEK). Lots of sushi of course. And the juice here is the best we have ever tasted! Besides juice, ice tea is really popular.

It takes 13 minutes from the train station to our house. It is i very simple one, the only furniture we have are a small table (you sitt on the floor), curtains, a bed and 2 futons. They are really hard to sleep on, but the cover is very warm and soft. Then there is a fridge and freezer, toilet, bathroom with a bathtub and shower, washingmachine, microwave oven and a stove. The best thing is the little balcony which you can go out on at night time and listen to the crickets.

the futon:

 Bonsai trees on the way to the train station:

The weather is very warm and humid. about 20 celsius something degrees. It rains a lot. Now we know why the japanese always has umbrellas. (need to get one of those)

This weekend we are visiting Ropongi and Tokyo Tower with Mr. W who was so kind to invite us to go with him, hopfully he is taking us to japanese interios design store aswell.
Going Harajuku to look at the lolitas and a temple on sunday.

First Weekend

It is now Sunday and tomorrow we start our 8 weeks long internship at IKEA Shin Misato AND we are moving to our new place!

It has been a great weekend. Both yesterday and today we spent in Shibuya (A very popular shopping destination for young and fashion awared people). We got there by taking the train first to Tokyo and then changeing trains. Mr. W wrote us some instructions.
It can´t be explained, it has to be experienced. Time flies when you are having fun as they say. It is really true. 2 long days, running around watching people, going to stores and shopping malls with at least 6 floors each, located besides each other, it never ends! And we haven't even seen half of it yet... You would have to stay in Shibuya for a week at least for that!
We managed to do some shopping as well, but not the first day. It was overwhelming. One thing is for sure; we love this amazing country more and more!

What a perfect way to start. To get the introduction in down town Tokyo. Talk to the locals, experience the fantastic shopping, eating sushi and discover it all and getting comfortable with this new inviroment.

We really needed these 2 days to settle down an get to know Japan in our own phase, to help us adjust.

The trip

...Luckily there where no monsune. The reason for the delay was overtrafficing on the runway, so we had to wait. The flight went well, but we did not arrive on time. On board we got a form to declare for customs. It said you could not bring fresh food, so we had to eat all our fruit before landing. (And there were a LOT.)

Finally we where in Japan!

The airport was nearly empty. When arriving, a man called for us. It was Mr.W, he recognized us! With millions of questions from two very excited, overlytired and happy girls he kindly and with a lot of patience answered all our questions.  We quickly bought traintickets to get to the hotel. It was going to be our home for the next 3 days. It was the last train for the eveing so we had to run. The adrenaline was pumping again and the energy was coming back. This is for real. Really for real!

The trains was very clean, calm and conditioned. And dear Mr.W bought us a a bottle of water. We were really dehydrated, because you can not take fluids with you on the plane.

We arrived at Misatu. A beautifull little town! Started walking to the hotel, stopped by at a store and bought noodles, juice and bread. By then we were exhausted and it was hard to think, thank God for Mr. W for helping us, he is worht his weight in gold.

 We have never tasted such tasty juice.

Because of the time of night, Mr. W stayed over at the hotel and we met up at breakfast. We were supposed to eat at the hotll, they served rice cakes... We went on to eat a sandwitch and ice tea instead. Afterwords Mr W helped us to buy washingpowder an later on cash cards for the subway. So tomorrow we are off to Shibuya!

The Trip

The travelers logg
We are at the Copenhagen airport. We are eating and studying japanese frases while waiting for our plane to arrive.

The clock is 15:10, it´s check-in time. Nervous, excited and very happy at the same time. Did we pack the right things for this trip? Maybe we should have brought more food? Millions of questions are in our heads. Suddenly it´s time to board the plane. Suddenly all questions stops and it feels good. We are on board and this is for real, today nothing can go wrong.

At the airplane we are working with our powerpoint presentation. The passengers next to us are from Japan and China. They are interested in Sweden and they know IKEA very well. Also H&M and Volvo etc. We tell them about The Entrepreneur School and our mission to Tokyo. They tell us many interesting things about China and Japan. Food is a very exciting topic.  = )

Arriving in Beijing we are a bit exhausted. Happy and still excited. Only slept 4 hours and lost 6 hours because of the time difference. We are taking long walks in the airport. I think we can say that we are experts at this airport. If you ever are going here you can ask us where the best view and comfortable seats are.
"The jetlag is kicking in... It's almost like we are walking around in a trance. This place is huge. The floors are shiny, not a lot of people and the same instumental music is playing in a loop for 8 hour straight.
The seats are not very comfortable and we do not know if it´s OK to sleep. When walking around to stay awake we found lounge chairs and a beutifull view! Outside the window we saw planes landing and taking off. One plane almost every minute!! We must have seen at least 700 planes today. Well, to be perfectly honest, Louisa did, Anna fell asleep after the first plane = )  "

Sudddenly we realize it´s time to go. Now the adrenalinerush make us wide awake. Only four hours left for us on this journey. While boarding we overhear someone talking about a monsun in Japan. Later on we ask ourself is this why we are still standing on the ground sitting at our seats in the plane. Almost 40 minutes has passed???

To be continued.....

Today we received our business cards. There is a japanese translation, what a beautiful written language. Don´t you think?

Our suitcases are (almost) packed and the passports are up to date.
Let´s go to Japan!!

And a message to the person that is meeting us when we arrive:
Dear Mr.W, look out for backpacks and hoodies with the green logo at the airport. See you at customs ;)

Last day in Leksand

It's Friday tomorrow, and our last day here in Leksand. We will not be back in school until 9 weeks from now. Our journey is starting with a (about) 9 hours long roadtrip to the southend of Sweden, Malmö. Where we will stay until next Thursday when the plane for Tokyo takes off!

Oh my goodness, we are going to miss all of our classmates and our wonderfull school an surroundings! When we see all of it again it will be cold and dark and on the verge of winter.

Have a great LIA (qualified internship) every one! We'll see you again in November!

The story of how

It all started around christmas 2009. Anna and Louisa was dreaming about Tokyo and IKEA. After the holidays we started to look around in our contact network for people that had something to do with IKEA and/or Japan and soon struck gold.
And with only a couple of e-mails we had an internship at IKEA, Shin Misato. The dream came true just before the summer. What a perfect way to start the summer!!
This is now 3 months ago. With the help of our new supervisors the 8-week internship is soon starting. We are leaving Leksand, Sweden in 11 days from today!!!

No worries! Well maybe the possible cultural crash and the bad english.... But that is nothing compared to everything else that's fabulous!

In this moment. 5.30 pm, Sunday, we are sitting in school working on the big powerpoint presentation "Swedishness". An 2 hour oral lecture about swedish homes and tradition.

Did you know that the Swedish person watch in average 3 hour TV a day and that we have 3 food-celebrations every year? Cream buns, waffels and cinnamonbuns.

The businescards are ordered. Louisa is changeing her name to Ru-u-i-sa when Anna is still the same and the scholarship is applied for aswell.