Gimme more

It’s Britney, bitch

No, it’s not Britney, it’s Pino, back blogging after some time off: I’m sorry I couldn’t bother you with my posts for a while, but I really had a lot to do at work and I spent my time at home mainly watching the anime Nana about which I will blog soon (I keep saying that, I know). Anyway, this is how I completely missed one week of stupid anecdotes on my blog I was supposed to write a post for each day but, honestly, I will never manage to fill the gap which is why I’m going to keep the long story short.

On Monday I was as busy as never before: it was the big day of reporting, as usual, my new colleague, Isabelle (this is a Dutch Isabelle, non the French one I had in Berlin), started working and needed some training and in the late afternoon we also had a big important meeting I couldn’t avoid. When I went home, really late, I was exhausted. But still the situation at work was already slowly improving: Isabelle has proven to be really independent and I could forget about Norway and Finland in just one day, on the other hand my boss probably read my blog and decided I was done with Portugal. It was the biggest relief ever. So now I’m really into the Swedish culture and I love to read local newspapers or news about Sweden, like this one about IKEA terminology (from The Guardian):

Sofas, coffee tables, bookshelves, media storage and doorknobs are named after places in Sweden (Klippan, Malmö); beds, wardrobes and hall furniture after places in Norway; carpets after places in Denmark and dining tables and chairs after places in Finland. Bookcases are mainly occupations (Bonde, peasant farmer; Styrman, helmsman). Bathroom stuff is named after lakes and rivers.
Kitchens are generally grammatical terms, and kitchen utensils are spices, herbs, fish, fruits, berries, or functional words such as Skarpt (it means sharp, and it’s a knife). Chairs and desks are Swedish men’s names (Roger, Joel); materials and curtains are women’s names. Children’s items are mammals, birds and adjectives (Ekorre is a set of children’s toy balls; it means squirrel).

Fantastic, isn’t it? Obviously I already understood a kind of a pattern behind the names of IKEA products, but I wasn’t expecting something that precise and elegant.

I don’t really remember what else happened last week worth to be mentioned. The weekend approached really fast and somehow also a spring feeling: since last Saturday the days are really sunny and almost warm. Which is why I really enjoyed shopping with Sveta in the city center: first at the Bijnkorf then at the manga shop on Zeedijk and finally we had a drink at Latei. On Sunday I enjoyed the sun again by waking up very early and in the afternoon Jörg visited me to bring some chocolates from Paris. Mmm delicious! When the sun set down, Krijn, who was supposed to watch with me some anime on Saturday night, texted me: we were invited by Erik to see 30Rock, a really funny sit-com. After some episodes and a couple of glasses of delicious chocolate liqueur another weekend was far too fast over.