Kit Kats for Marcos

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I bought this box of limited edition Kit Kat minis for Marcos, keeping up my usual tradition of buying him unusual Kit Kat flavors. This one in particular has little cookies somehow sandwiched above the wafer thing. However, in a fit of snacking, I broke it open and proceeded to eat all of the minis in pretty much one sitting. (It was a stressful day.)

Animals that are "friends"

-excerpted from The New York Times, by Jon Mooallem

The Laysan albatross is a downy seabird with a seven-foot wingspan and a notched, pale yellow beak. Every November, a small colony of albatrosses assembles at a place called Kaena Point, overlooking the Pacific at the foot of a volcanic range, on the northwestern tip of Oahu, Hawaii. Each bird has spent the past six months in solitude, ranging over open water as far north as Alaska, and has come back to the breeding ground to reunite with its mate. Albatrosses can live to be 60 or 70 years old and typically mate with the same bird every year, for life. Their “divorce rate,” as biologists term it, is among the lowest of any bird.

When I visited Kaena Point in November, the first birds were just returning, and they spent a lot of their time gliding and jackknifing in the wind a few feet overhead or plopped like cushions in the sand. There are about 120 breeding albatrosses in the colony, and gradually, each will arrive and feel out the crowd for the one other particular albatross it has been waiting to have sex with again. At any given moment in the days before Thanksgiving, some birds may be just turning up while others sit there killing time. It feels like an airport baggage-claim area.

Once together, pairs will copulate and collaboratively incubate a single egg for 65 days. They take shifts: one bird has to sit at the nest while the other flaps off to fish and eat for weeks at a time. Couples preen each other’s feathers and engage in elaborate mating behaviors and displays. “Like when you’re in a couple,” Marlene Zuk, a biologist who has visited the colony, explained to me. “All those sickening things that couples do that gross out everyone else but the two people in the couple? . . . Birds have the same thing.” I often saw pairs sitting belly to belly, arching their necks and nuzzling together their heads to form a kind of heart shape.

About two dozen birds were knocking around when Lindsay Young and I arrived at Kaena Point one afternoon. Young dished about a few of them — “Her mate didn’t show up last year”; “God, this one’s annoying” — as they waddled by. Laysan albatrosses are not nearly as graceful on land as they are in the air; even they seem surprised by the size of their feet. (Later that week, at a nearby resort, I would recognize their gait while watching an out-of-shape snorkeler toddle back to his beach towel in rented flippers.)

Young and I ambled around for half an hour, maybe more. Then she pointed and, in a monotone, said, “So, that’s a female-female pair.” We crouched and watched the two birds, numbers 169 and 983. They sat under a spindly, native Hawaiian naio bush. They made baa sounds at each other.

Homosexual activity is often observed in animal populations with a shortage of one sex — in the wild but more frequently at zoos. Some biologists anthropomorphically call this “the prisoner effect.” That’s basically the situation at Kaena Point: there are fewer male albatrosses than females (although not every male albatross has a mate). Because it takes two albatrosses to incubate an egg, switching on and off at the nest, a female that can’t find a male (or maybe, Young says, who can’t find “a good-enough male”) has no chance of producing a chick and passing on her genes. Quickly mating with an otherwise-committed male, then pairing with another single female to incubate the egg, is a way to raise those odds.

[Only a few months before I visited Kaena Point, two penguins at the San Francisco Zoo became the latest in a tradition of captive same-sex penguin couples making global headlines. After six years together — in which the two birds even fostered a son, named Chuck Norris — the penguins split up when one of the males ran off with a female named Linda. The zoo’s penguin keeper, Anthony Brown, told me he received angry e-mail, accusing him of separating the pair for political reasons. “Penguins make their own decisions here at the San Francisco Zoo,” Brown assured me. And while he stressed that there is no scientific way of determining if animals are “gay,” because the word connotes a sexual orientation, not just a behavior, he also noted that, being the San Francisco Zoo, “there’s definitely a lot of opinion here, internally, that we give in and call the penguins gay.”]

“There's two mating right there,” Lindsay Young called out. They were right below her, 10 yards away on a flat, vegetated ridge. It was late afternoon. One albatross lay on its stomach, wobbling with its wings pulled back — the way penguins slide over ice — while a second stood upright behind it, fat rippling down its telescoping neck, as it pumped its pelvis. The birds carried on for a while. Then the male shivered and retracted. The female came to her feet and walked off.

Young read the female’s leg band with her binoculars. “You just hit the jackpot,” she told me. The bird was part of a female-female pair. The male had another mate.Young started scribbling notes, and we sat there rapidly rehashing the details. The sex didn’t seem forced at all. In a rape, Young said — which, for all the talk of albatross monogamy, is not uncommon in the species — a male will pin a female’s neck to the ground, or back her into a bush to tangle her up. (One study observed four different gangs of males forcing themselves on a single female, which lost an eye in the process.) But these two birds hardly seemed in a rush. Young made more notes. Then, with the male bird frozen right where he’d been left, the female slapped her rubbery feet on the ground, caught an updraft and disappeared over the ocean.

The next morning, Young still seemed to be assuring herself that her interpretation of what we’d seen was reasonable. “We didn’t see how it started, but how it ended looked . . . ” — she searched for a precise, nonanthropomorphic phrase. She couldn’t really find one, and let out a self-effacing laugh. “Mutually beneficial?” she said. “I don’t know!”

Chiquita Banana Refresh

About a year ago, I blogged about bananas (here) when I talked about how I might have started liking bananas a whole lot sooner if they had their cute new labels way back when. Then today, I stumbled across a link on The Dieline to this posting on Design Related about the new labels that were designed for Chiquita...

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Chiquita Banana Brand Refresh

An Interview with the Designer, DJ Neff

by matt sung, February 04, 2010

Chiquita's latest ad campaign imbues its audience with an instant sense of wonder. Using playful illustrations on stickers juxtaposed to the iconic Chiquita stickers, the product and brand become more engaging to the consumer—plus they just look cool. We got a chance to ask the Art Director, DJ Neff, some questions about the process of making bananas (even more) fun.

What can you tell us about creating this new campaign for Chiquita?

The process relied heavily in spending as much time with the product as possible. In this case it meant my partner Mark Krajan and I eating a bunch of bananas a day. Thankfully, we like bananas.It helps to immerse ourselves in the product and research as much as we can before coming up with ideas. In this case that emphasis was on the fruit and its cultural significance. After filling up on information, we let it all spill out in different ideas, drawings, sayings, photographs, then start to figure out truths. These truths all stem from the product and work outward, pulling from research and ideas to build upon the foundation, laddering up to a big idea.

The cornerstone of the campaign relied on the little blue stickers, the biggest icon for the brand, and the biggest way to get the word out. It was obvious the character stickers were going to be a must do, but we pushed to create more, something fun for people to do, a hub for Chiquita fans to go to. Further thinking led us to giving bananas personalities and how all bananas start out good but eventually go bad (and for consumers not to let that happen). "Dont Let Another Good Banana Go Bad" was the through line of our campaign and it was incorporated into all of our work. The idea grew into a fully immersive microsite that contained viral videos, a sticker generator, and a completely unique 3D flash game called Banana Boogie Battle. This experience gave the users opportunities to create their own banana sticker personality and breakdance battle against bananas that have turned to the dark side.

What were your client's goals, and how did this project help communicate them?

The client’s goals were kind of like that dream brief you get handed that simply says: “Make bananas cool.” At first it’s like, “Whoa that’s easy,” but many times the more open the brief, the more you have to do to check yourself creatively. It can be easy to get caught up in a landslide of slick executions or fad creative wrappers. These kinds of approaches often do little for the campaign’s longevity or brand image in the future. Our client expects us to come to them with the coolest and most innovative stuff, but it was still up to us to really figure out strategically what about Chiquita bananas would always be cool. Determining what was cool fell into a few different areas: creativity, expression, and entertainment.

We created a range of ideas that we felt kept true to the Chiquita brand equities and allowed consumers to interact with the brand in new cool and exciting ways. In partnering with The Famous Group in Los Angeles, we were able to execute all of our ideas in the same facility, from shooting videos, editing, 3D modeling, and designing the website itself. We weren't creating just a campaign, we were creating a multi-faceted, interactive brand experience from the ground up. Also, knowing the client would want to track results in real time, we felt integrating with Facebook gave us a lot of advantages in exposure and instant communication between the brand and its enthusiasts.

These illustrations are really great and fun. What inspired you to create this family of characters?

Inspiration for the face idea first came from seeing what people did with the chiquita stickers after they ate the banana even before we put faces on them. So, the hope was by creating the characters, now when they eat the banana, they are even more excited and inspired to put that sticker somewhere special to keep it. The designs themselves had to be fun, so I just thought about all the fun things I like, cartoons, toys, people I know, and they sort of just came out. Honestly, we did so many stickers the hardest part was picking only 25.

How did your interactions with the client evolve? Did they give you guys creative freedom from the get go, or was it something that took more effort to express your own vision?

Our interactions with the client were fairly typical, but fortunately the client was hungry to do something different. Surprisingly working with bananas isn’t the bowl of laughs most think it should be. Being a commodity, it’s a pretty straight business. It’s hard to sway consumers when purchases are made primarily based on price. Luckily, Chiquita had already made efforts to “cool” up the stickers in the past—nothing like we had imagined, but it helped pave the way for our ideas for sure. Once we showed them the direction, they were excited about the possibilities, but pushed us to create a campaign that would have longevity. We were given a lot of freedom to design and create it the way we imagined it, but we liked involving their input as much as we could. It’s really important to maintain an open communication channel about our goals as designers while trying to integrate the clients needs and educating them on solutions we felt could work. A lot of the time you have to not only be creative with the campaign, but also be creative with the way you talk about it, coming up with ideas sometimes on the spot to help keep your client interested and excited. All in all it was a great experience and I am thankful we had clients like we did. It showed in the work.

So, what is “brand equity”, and what makes it significant not only for Chiquita but also for other brands out there?

I like to talk about brand equity in what I do because I feel like it is the most important starting point to rebranding any business. I think brand equity is a pretty simple notion: unique value. Sometimes it’s an easy to see value, like the Chiquita stickers, or sometimes it can be harder to recognize, like an old forgotten tagline that was abandoned because of changing fads. This is where my job gets fun, in discovering unique traits a brand has to build on, even if they may be lost in the marketing shuffle over the years.

The great thing about looking hard at something the brand already owns, no matter how small, is that there is usually a cultural recognition there already. With some application of this value to an idea you have, it creates a familiar association with an unfamiliar dynamic, therefore creating intrigue in the viewer—much like pop art does. In the case of Chiquita, we felt that there was a lot of brand equity in the stickers, both with product interaction and marketing potential. Creating a campaign to really maximize its potential creatively was a smart decision and gave added value to an already established brand equity.

Sometimes brand equity is created and not found, like with a product that is new or unprecedented. In this case brand equity can exist within brands surrounding the product in the cultural landscape. Similar values with other companies, many times from different categories, can lend themselves to a new product because of a familiar association or cultural significance. Then our job as designers becomes recognizing the area that our product lives in, or wants to live in, and creating value to allow its seamless placement amongst its peers. Like if you’re going to a black tie affair you don’t wear a Hawaiian shirt, you wear a tuxedo or formal dress. So when designing a brand for your product, make sure you know what party you are going to go to because what you wear speaks wonders about who you are.

Many times as designers we are tasked to help brands build or rebuild their identities. We may initially think that a clean slate is required to achieve a better identity, and in some cases that can be true if the existing brand identity has little to no value. But in most cases, there is always something that can be built on, discovered, or championed with any brand. It really just requires spending as much time as you can with the product, immersing yourself in it. Like method designing, you just have to live it and the work will flow through you.

French crunchy caramel things

they look like this before you pop it in your mouth

they look like this on the shelf at the store in France

Elysha shared some of her coveted chocolate caramal crunchy candies with me today during a meeting. I had never tasted these particular candies before and I have to say, they are incredibly addictive. It is a good thing that I don't live in Paris...I would be so fat.

A knitted world

Helen sent me this link this morning, and it made my day. Which says a lot, since I left both my of my lunch options at home this morning, forgot to brush my teeth before I left the house, and I didn't eat any breakfast.

Vinegar Hill House

I met a friend for brunch today at Vinegar Hill House — a place that has been on my list for while, but which I haven't gotten around to eating at until today. It is a quick bike ride from my apartment, and located about a block away from where all of my stuff is living in storage, deep in the Vinegar Hill part of DUMBO. Or maybe it's it own little neighborhood, and it is not a part of DUMBO. Whatever.

Either way, I had a perfectly yummy meal of toast fingers (strips of toasted focaccia) with two poached eggs over fava bean puree, cucumbers and pickled onions. It came in a medium sized bowl and the portion was about what I would have made for myself at home — i.e. not too much that I could not finish it all — although I had to ask for two more strips of toast as the ratio of toast to stuff to stick on the toast was not quite right. Poached eggs and fava bean puree require toast for eating properly, in my opinion.

I love Tupperware

Each of the storage canisters in the Servalier line, which nested within one another in graduated sizes, came with a decorative flower emblem on its smudge-proof textured exterior. With the canisters, like the one "made to order for the larger package of Ritz crackers," Tupperware sought to capitalize on the increasing popularity of packaged foods.

Along with the Bell Tumblers, Tupperware introduced the lidded, nesting Wondelier Bowls. With an 80 percent increase in home refrigeration in the 1940s, food storage proved to be the perfect application for Tupper's durable polymer. The stackable containers organized the fridge and spoke to a growing interest in hygiene; their patented "burping" seal-its name echoing a primary maternal task of 1940s housewives—kept foods fresh.

One of Tupperware's strategies for expansion has been to develop items for specialized storage needs. First introduced in the 1960s, this "lettuce keeper" was designed to help greens retain their freshness and color. Inside the bowl was a removable round grate that held a lettuce head stationary on a spike, suspending it above any moisture that might accumulate at the bottom of the bowl. The domed section of its pull-tab lid depressed when sealed to remove excess air, further ensuring crispness.

The Servalier canister also came with an "instant touch," air-tight lid that was designed to be closed easily by pushing down on the center of the lid's sunburst pattern, a lasting Tupperware feature seen here on the Astro Bowl from a decade later.

Every 2.5 seconds, somewhere on the planet, a Tupperware party is thrown; nearly $1.4 billion dollars' worth of Tupperware is sold annually in more than 100 markets worldwide. By the numbers alone, the kitchenware company that New Hampshire inventor Earl Tupper founded in 1939 displays its reach. Take a closer look at Tupperware's trajectory, and you can chart the past half-century of kitchen culture in the U.S. and beyond.

Tupperware products actually had their inception not in the kitchen but on the battlefield; Earl Tupper had worked for DuPont developing the country's first plastics for use in World War II radars. Around 1942, casting about for nonmilitary uses for the flexible material, he created an injection-molded polyethylene cup, which he called the Bell Tumbler. It was introduced to the market in 1946.

Tupperware fit the changing American lifestyle in other ways, too.

From 1947 to 1953, America's suburban population grew by 1.3 million people per year, and the use of Tupperware spread with the suburbs, aided by a sales method matched to the postwar era's renewed domesticity: the Tupperware Home Party, an all-female gathering centered on product demonstrations. As Americans entertained more at home, Tupperware developed hostess-friendly items like the bowl-and-platter Dip 'N Serve Tray.

Always more functional than fashionable, Tupperware products reflect the most practical concerns of the world's home cooks: Kimchi Keepers for Korea, ventilated CheeSmart cheese storers for Europe, the microwave-friendly TupperWave Stack Cooker for the fast-paced American market. The new Keep Tabs containers—nesting with their lids on, like Russian dolls, and available in sizes as small as five ounces—were an instant hit in countries like Mexico and Uruguay where kitchens are small and every bit of saved food counts. The sets are just one of 135 new products Tupperware released last year, many of them made with both space-saving and conservation in mind.

-Saveur Magazine, April 2010

Ode to Shel Silverstein

Almond Pesto: Hello Vitamin E!

Despite having some vestiges of the flu, I mustered up the energy to cook dinner for Sheri, since we were long overdue for a hang out. I had found the above recipe in Fine Cooking magazine on Tuesday, when I was getting my nails done at Element, and instead of taking the whole magazine, which would have been wrong but so very convenient, I went to Barnes + Noble on Wednesday and picked up my own copy.

And I was actually very good about following the recipe. The only substitutions that I made were that I used whole wheat spaghetti instead of linguine. (But I always substitute whole wheat in for regular, so I don't even count that.) I also bought heirloom cherry tomatoes as I thought that they would add more color..it is spring and all. And I bought a package of dry roasted, unsalted sliced almonds from Trader Joes, so that I would not have to bother roasting my own (laziness). I also doubled the pesto recipe for whatever reason, and now I have a ton of it left over. Mind you, I did refrain from using both boxes of fresh basil, and only threw one into the food processor. One box was still more than the 1/4 cup it called for, hence the doubling of the recipe.

Freesia

Afghan Star

I am home on vacation today, and not feeling well. Consequently, I am laying around on my couch, watching television. I happened upon a documentary on the Afghan version of American Idol, called Afghan Star. Apparently, it just aired on HBO on March 18 and will be out soon on DVD. It is so great. And while I wish I was at Union Market buying goat butter, which was on my list for today, watching this is a good second option since I feel completely lackluster.

The format of Afghan Star is similar to the British Pop Idol or the French Nouvelle Star and their many spinoffs, though it is independently produced and not a licensed adaptation. The program starts with auditions from aspiring singers in their late teens and early 20s. A panel of judges choose the best auditionees and puts them through to the public voting round of the contest. At this stage, each week every singer performs and the viewers vote for which singer they prefer using their cell phones. In every round, whoever gets the lowest amount of votes leaves the competition until just one is left, who is declared the winner.

The first series of Afghan Star was launched in September 2005, with over 1000 hopefuls from around Afghanistan gathering to partake in the talent search. The eventual winner of the series was Shakeb Hamdard from Kabul who released his debut album Mashalla in late 2007.

Afghan Star (Season 2) started in August 2006 with auditions in Kabul, Mazar, Herat, Kandahar, Jalalabad and Peshawar. The talent net was widened with even Afghans from Pakistan and Iran encouraged to participate. The second AfghanStar was even more successful than the first, with Najibullah Mahmoudi a 35 year old man from Mazar voted the winner. Najibullah Mahmoudi has signed a recording contract with Barbud Music, the same company who release Shakeb Hamdard's music.

The third season of Afghan Star debuted in October 2007. Auditions were held in Kunduz and Ghanzi as well as cities visited in previous series. At this stage, Afghan Star became one of the most watched, and talked about shows on Afghan television, regularly attracting 11 million viewers per episode. The high profile of the show meant hightened security was introduced around the studios and contestants of the show. The eventual winner of the third series of Afghan Star was Rafi Naabzada, once again from Mazar.

Fourth season The fourth season of Afghan Star debuted in December 2008. Changes to the format of the show were introduced, including an extra show broadcast per week. The ultimate winner of the season was Naweed Furogh from Kabul.

I heart Viva Le Crepe

Juliana and I stopped by Vive La Crepe on Spring Street, for a quick snack, this afternoon. I wanted a goat cheese + spinach crêpe, while she wanted to get a dulce de leche crêpe for Shai. Last weekend, I happened to notice the super cute little shop and had been wanting to check it out, given my current obsession with savory crêpes — see last weekend's post.

The shop seats about 15 people, with maybe 5-6 people being able to sit at a little bar against the front window, and there are maybe 5-6 tables that seat 2 people each. The crêpes are made to order (obviously) and run the gamut from classics such as a simple butter and sugar crêpe or a Nutella crêpe to more savory crêpes such as ones with ham + cheese inside, or the goat cheese + spinach one that I had.

Interestingly enough, the brand, (La Crêpe Parisienne) was created and developed by three Mexican brothers after living in Paris. Their first crêpe place opened in Mexico City in 1996. Initially, they sold crêpes from small street carts, but as sales grew, the brothers chose to change the business model to kiosks and stores that could accommodate a larger demand. The spot on Spring Street is their only location in the United States.

Wool and the Gang, redux

Juliana and I took Shai to the playground on Thompson Street and spotted the Wool and the Gang storefront, across the street. I had happily posted about this company about a year ago (see the post, here) and was excited to see that they actually had a brick and mortar store open (since November), as opposed to just being a website. Since I was supposed to be on my way to the West Village to buy a birthday gift anyway I thought I would stop in and check it out.

The store is pretty minimal: pretty much it is a large work table and a wall full of yarn arranged in color order. You can buy the yarn as it is, or buy one of their special Wool and the Gang kits — with or without the needles. (The needles are lovely and some sort of darkish wood, but they add about $15-20 to the overall kit). I bought Christina the Snood Dogg kit for her birthday, with some turquoise (her signature color.) yarn...

Cupcakes from Billy's

I ordered some cupcakes from Billy's Bakery for Sara's birthday, today. Red Velvet, Banana, Carrot, Chocolate and Vanilla...

The sunshine in my apartment

Birdy Cookie

Michelle and I went for a walk in Prospect Park this morning, and after 3.5 miles, I was starving. So we stopped off at Joyce Bakeshop, where I bought a very appropriate cookie for the first day of Spring: a pink birdy cookie. Which I ate in about 10 seconds, flat. (I like this picture because the bird is "sitting" on the tree branches' shadows.)

Colombe Coffee Shop

I walked by the La Colombe coffee shop on Lafayette Street (near the corner of Prince Street) today and loved the little bird logo/motif on the window. I personally hate coffee, so the supposed loveliness of the coffee itself is rather lost on me, but the shop looked super cute and it seemed like some place that you would find in Brooklyn, not in Soho. Which is a compliment to Soho, in all honesty.

Happy Spring!

I rode my bicycle across the Manhattan Bridge today and it was the most joyful ride; the first bike ride of the season on the most perfectly amazing day all year thus far. The air smelled rendolent of fresh earth and newly bloomed flowers, and the sounds were of people feeling happy. All over Soho, people were carrying these pinwheels, and it was just so super seeing everyone thoroughly enjoying the beautiful weather. It was as if the entire city was happily celebrating that winter was gone for another year.

Brainstorming on a Friday

a mind map of the color blue

post it notes with our initial thoughts

What's for lunch?

Whole wheat pasta with tuna, fresh peas, fresh mint, shredded broccoli and carrots, dressed with olive oil, fresh meyer lemon juice and sea salt.

Lambs for pets

This just further cements my desire to own a lamb for a pet. Mind you, I am not all into cute pet videos, but this has got to be the cutest thing I have ever seen...especially considering how much I want a lamb.

The sunset

Lilies, part ?

Hot chocolate at Le Gamin

Instead of going to yoga class, Ladan and I decided to go have lunch at Le Gamin on Vanderbilt Avenue. Which, while not as good for our physical bodies, was perhaps on par to doing yoga, from a mental perspective. We had a very nice and lengthy chat about everything from Urban Dictionary to the meaning of the actual word, Le Gamin. Plus, I had not eaten Le Gamin's special crepe (buckwheat galette with roasted zucchini, goat cheese and ratatouille) in a very long time, and was experiencing signs of withdrawal. And the other big plus, is that the folks at Le Gamin will make you a soy milk hot chocolate without giving you a disdainful look for not partaking in the wondrous world of dairy.

Design Thinking + Sustainability at Parsons

Tonight, I went to go hear Chris Hacker (the Chief Creative Officer of Johnson + Johnson) speak on the topic of Design + Sustainability, as part of the AIGA lecture series. A bunch of people from our studio went, and it was truly great to see Chris speak, since this was my first time hearing him give a talk outside of the office. The moment Cherith sent me the email, I was all like, please let's buy tickets now before it sells out. Other than some powerpoint issues, which reinforces why I think that program sucks terribly, the talk was pretty interesting. A few other people from the office, (Lisa, Elan and Mike) spoke, and I appreciated hearing them speak publicly as it always gives a nice perspective to hear your mentors and colleagues talk outside of the office. And it further refueled? replenished? cemented? my pride in working at Johnson + Johnson's design office.

How I fell in ♥ with a fish

After my Swedish Fish posting, this seemed appropriate, as it is what we watched during the staff meeting, while we ate the Swedish Fish Eggs. Dan Barber is both funny, illuminating, and truly inspirational. There are many times we simply think that by eating organic food or recycling, that we are helping the planet. Really pushing ourselves to think beyond the obvious to those ideas which are truly extraordinary (which are usually the most obvious ideas, to begin with) is what we need to be doing to truly change our lives and the world we live in.

Swedish Fish...eggs

Last weekend, when I was in NJ with Adileh, I found a mother lode of Easter candy at the CVS near her house. The drugstores in New York City never have a candy selection of that magnitude and I was super excited specifically by the Swedish Fish Eggs. I opened the bag today during our staff meeting and was delighted by the fact that each mini-package had a different fish quote on it. I imagined that the designer working on this packaging was giggling the entire time. It is so silly; I love it.

I ♥ this jade tree

Good outfit day

I decided that I wanted to wear my most favorite winter coat today...my green one from Uniqlo which I don't wear all that often because I want to preserve it's specialness, and then I put my outfit together around that: brown tunic, green + brown scarf, brown under clothes, brown + green eyeglasses, green clogs and a green stem print Orla Kiely bag. It made me feel so springy and the happiness lasted all the way until the elevator when I realized that I left my tea thermos at home.

Japanese cleaning products

We had a team field trip to Mitsuwa Marketplace, in Edgewater NJ, and I noticed that a large proportion of Japanese cleaning products have little faces on them. I personally love this and wondered why the little creatures on cleaning products in the United States (the Scrubbing Bubbles, for example) had to be so lame in comparison.

Where in the world is Ronald McDonald?

When I exited the baggage claim at Düsseldorf's airport, I happened upon Ronald McDonald casually waiting for...his loved ones?McBurglar? to disembark.

Person of the Day: Richie Ofosu

Tonight, when I got in a taxi at the Dusseldorf Airport, I was immediately struck by how cheerful the driver was. This was in juxtaposition to how incredibly bitchy the people were at Heathrow Airport tonight, so I was initially relieved that it was not some "be mean to Aimee" pandemic.

I then heard the driver speaking to his wife? via handsfree in Twi (or maybe it was Fanti?)and it was such a odd sensation sitting in a taxi in Germany, hearing Twi being spoken when I have not heard it for years. The driver was also shocked that someone in his taxi actually recognized what he was speaking, although sadly, I have forgotten pretty much all that I learned while I lived there. I guess, if I was truly dedicated, I could buy the Pimsleur language course for Twi, here. But that will come after the Spanish, Japanese and Mandarin. And by then, I might just be really too old to care.

Regardless, Richie and I exchanged email addresses so that the next time I am in Dusseldorf, I can go over to his house and have fufu with light soup together with him and his wife. He let me know that I have an outstanding invitation. I got the impression that not many Dusseldorfians care about his Ghanaian heritage or probably have never expressed their love of beans with gari foto or kenkey while in his cab. It pretty much made my night, and his, I think it would be fair to say.