On true happiness

Not that I have too much time for anything like this. If I could choose, I probably would spend about an hour each morning like this - on Starbucks, with my Kindle (product placement, much? *snort*), having a relaxing start of my day. But alas, my mornings tend to be far more stressful than that. I frequently sleep too little (especially in Tokyo), so I get up too late. I run to the shower, try to make time for both breakfast and basic make-up, and then I'm off to work. I can only dream of having the time to pick up a coffee most days, little less sit down to drink it.

In a perfect world I would have that kind of time. Or I would make that kind of time. But then... If this was my daily routine, perhaps I wouldn't appreciate it as much..?

On my weekend

We're crazying up at work. Our prime minister is visiting next week (did I already mention that? I think not. It's been a lid on/lid off thing [that's an expression, right? In some language? Not Norwegian I think. English? Maybe I made it up... But y'all understand what it means, though - right?] for a while, because there were some protocol restrictions on who were inviting whom and such. Anyway..), and this is causing a lot of extra work for everyone - including the trainees. Thus, it was nice to work only one hour overtime on Friday, and then go home - collapse in bed hours before my bedtime, and concentrate on nothing than a missed episode of Raising Hope (because Big Bang Theory and Community both skipped a week. What's up with that?!)

On Saturday I took a personal day. Okay, so I wasn't working anyway, but most Saturdays and Sundays thus far in Tokyo have been spent sightseeing or some form of touristing. It gets exhausting. Instead, I brought my laptop and snuck out of the house early in the morning (or, you know, noon, which is still pretty early for most of the people living in my building), headed for the nearest (or actually, not the nearest at all. More like the 5th nearest. I wouldn't want anyone to find me...) Starbucks.

My laptop and I had some quality time there. First of all I cleaned up my "My Documents" folder, which was a total mess. I once had a system, but after various laptop changes and backups, it had crashed and burned. Now, it's all neat and folderized, and some of the duplicate documents have been deleted. Never mind that I still have another laptop at home plus an extended hard drive that needs a make-over...  Happiness looks like a neatly organized hard drive. In the process I also discovered several writing projects I had not quite forgotten, but at least filed in the very back of my mind. Interestingly, several of them made me want to pick them back up, none of them made me delete them (except the one-sentence one. No, I cannot read your mind, Cruella2004. You'll have to be slightly more specific than "like that movie, but the other way around"..), and one or two had me chuckling when re-reading (and yes, in the good way). Thus, the idea bank is safe (and now organized, yay!).

What I also noticed at Starbucks was that this apparently is the place many Japanese go to sleep off their Friday night escapades. In general, sleeping in public places is a bit of a thing here... Weird.

After Starbucks the Norwegian in me awoken and I decided that it was horrible to spend a sunny Saturday indoors, no matter how happy it made me. So I started walking.

What I love about Tokyo (or indeed any large - and reasonably safe - city with a good public transportation system; London and Washington D.C. come to mind) is that if you are not going anywhere specific, you can just randomly walk without a map (an added bonus for a mapilliterate, like myself) and still know you'll find your way home since there are metro stations everywhere.

So I picked a direction, and walked. After about ten minutes, I had a choice between right and (not wrong, but) left, and I picked left on the grounds that it looked slightly more appealing than right. I was right. After about ten more minutes, I got into a more official looking area, with guards and walls and fences. A sign informed me that I was passing the office building for the House of Representatives to the National Diet. (On a side note - the word "Diet" to describe your parliament, is confusing. If you google "Japanese Diet", only about half of the hits are about the parliament, while the rest concern rice & raw fish.)

"Poor politicians," I thought. "I must be very frustrating to have their offices so far away from the actual Diet building." And then I passed a corner, and there it was - the Diet.

See, I know that Tokyo is big. Thus it always surprises me so when I discover that it isn't as big everywhere. Or rather, even in huge Tokyo, some distances are small. Like the one from "my" Starbucks (only five away from where I live) to the Diet building. It's only a short Sunday walk, really.

Once you get to the Diet, it is also just a short walk to the government district (Kasumigaseki), the Imperial Palace, and Hibiya (where I've spent some time, so the area is familiar to me). Thus my guilt walk turned into an epiphany of sorts, making this large city slightly smaller to me.

All this time I kept wishing I had brought my camera. See, as much as I love my camera, it is also too big to bring along "just in case". Unless I know I will actually use it, I will leave it at home (and I made a mistaken last minute decision before leaving Norway regarding bringing my compact camera. Meaning I didn't, in case that was unclear). Yesterday, though, was a beautiful day. Lovely light, and a ton of great motifs my darling Buck (that's my non-compact camera...) would have done justice. Such as the single blossoming cherry/plum tree I passed (the blossom is a BIG deal here. Will post on that some other time. Regarding the cherry/plum distinction I am no expert, but I have been told that the plum goes first, so I am guessing the cherries are the ones that haven't started yet). Or the skyscrapers in Kasumigaseki bathed in sunlight. Eventually what made me cave in and pull out my (inferior) cell phone camera was the lovely view of the Imperial Palace in the sunlight. Thus, one picture from yesterday to share:

I swear, Buck would have done a better job, but at least you get an idea what lovely weather it was, and how pretty the palace (or rather, one of the entrances) looked, reflected in the water.

This post is getting long. Sorry - digressionist at work...

I got back home (by metro - it was a relatively short walk, but it seemed much longer to attempt to walk both ways..), stopped by my new favourite store (Don Quixote - it has everything. Everything, I say), went home, made dinner, crashed in bed early again.

Sunday - today - I got up, got out, and spent all day with two friends up in the Harajuku area. Harajuku is probably one of the craziest, weirdest, funniest, most interesting places in Tokyo. It's where all the cool kids (and let me emphasize the word kids. Many of them are no older than 12-15, and even the ones that are, frequently try to look around that age. It's a little creepy, actually...) hang. It's where much of the cosplay take place. It's where you'll find rockabilly Japanese, dancing rock&roll to the delight of passing tourists. But it also has a nice park (Yoyogi) and a beautiful temple and shrine area (which I visited a few weeks ago). We had a great time walking around in the (still) lovely weather. It feels a lot like spring in Tokyo these days (but I am convinced I will regret saying that tomorrow, when it will supposedly rain).

All in all a pretty nice weekend. Definitely a nice break from work. Muchly needed mental and physical rest, and I'm sure the exercise and fresh air can't hurt either. Though I sort of wish I had one more day off before going back to the crazy tomorrow...

Finally, one extra picture (since I just transferred a batch from my mediocre cell phone cam to the laptop). This is a follow-up to a request from the very first post I wrote from Tokyo. Kids bathing in a peach. I say no more...

On Starbucks

Mmmmmm....

I don't care how commercialized, expensive-ized, sugarized, mass-produced-ized, non-eco-friendly-ized, not-as-good-coffee-as-non-chain-coffee-shops-ized Starbucks may be. There is still very few things that top lounging in a Starbucks a lazy Sunday afternoon, sipping coffee, listening to music, reading/writing/chatting, relaxing. And the best part - you can do this in any Starbucks, anywhere in the world. The beauty of mass production, I guess.

We don't have Starbucks in Norway. It's a hopeless market. Oslo already has a large number of coffee shops - many of them serving high quality coffee, for more affordable prices than what Starbucks would land on if the price regime follows that of other countries. Norwegians are used to paying much for their coffee, but then they are also used to getting quality coffee back. As it is, there is a question whether Starbucks is needed, wanted or even possible in Norway. We have long coffee traditions; we're used to thinking we do certain things best at home (or at least "in Europe"); and there is a latent skepticism towards consumerism(/Americanism?) that often surfaces in Norwegians when faced with the potential introduction of new products. We don't have KFC or Dunkin' Donuts either.

And yet. The fact that we have a lot of money and drink a lot of coffee in Norway, is bound to make us interesting for the American chain. Thus they are looking into the Norwegian market, aiming at establishing some customer recognition by selling their pre-produced iced lattes and such in stores and kiosks. Gradually, they are going to open stores, first at airports, and then eventually (possibly) in Oslo. Or so is the strategy as of today (as far as I know. I should probably mention that I don't have a direct line to the people in charge, and thus cannot say for sure whether this is the actual strategy. But this is the strategy our newspapers report, and that is good enough for me).

One major risk, in addition to the competition and the tough market, is that the Starbucks business model might be more difficult to promote in Norway than elsewhere. Because of the many established coffee houses in Norway, where the "sit-ins" are far more established, it is likely that Starbucks will have better chances of competing with the more recent take-away market (which today largely is handled by 7-11 and the likes of it, especially outside of the major cities). Usually Starbucks coffee shops have many employees, which allows for a speedy making of the coffee suitable for the take-away segment of the customers. In Norway, however, where salary costs are quite high, it is unlikely that Starbucks will be willing or able to have as many workers on the same shift. Thus, they risk slowing down the coffee making process, which in turn will make Starbucks a less attractive alternative for the take-awayers.

From one of the many Facebook groups...
(guess which side)

I don't envy whomever is in charge of the "Norway probe". It will be a tough job. They don't enter entirely unsupported, though. There are a large number of Facebook groups called "We want Starbucks in Norway" or something similar, the largest of which have more than 25,000 members. I am one of them. I am also a member of at least two groups against establishing Starbucks in Norway. This does not only reflect my confusions with regards to the chain; I think it reflects many Norwegians' opinion (then again - there are also a couple of "I really don't care if Starbucks establishes in Norway"-groups, which perhaps is the most accurate of all).

In the end, however, if and when Starbucks does open a store in Oslo, I think it most likely will be a success during its first week, and then it is completely in the blue. Will people stay true to their old habits and pick the coffee they think is the best when they have time (aka not Starbucks), and the coffee they think is the fastest when they don't (aka not Starbucks, again)? Or will they be willing to accept the Starbucks concept of vanilla/cinnamon/caramel/lazy-Sunday-heaven, occasionally transformed into semi-fast take-away (since there is only financial justification for one person at work per shift)?

Time will show. I have my doubts, though. I'm not convinced Starbucks will conquer Norway.

Thus, don't judge me. If I want to spend my non-Norway Sundays in Starbucks, I feel entitled to do so. Whether I'm in Japan, the United States, or any of the other 55 countries where the it's currently located. I might not feel the same way if and when I get the chance in Norway.



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And yes - I am aware of the irony of posting this on the same week as I spoke so grandly on fair-trade. That is another issue about coffee and/or Starbucks...