Toykio. Come play with us
- If shopping is supposed to be an experience rather than simply raiding the rails and shelves, there are only a few places that can live up to your expectations and truly surprise and inspire you. Toykio is one of them. After some successful years as an online shop and a pop-up gallery on Königsallee, the guys from Toykio built their new headquarter in the Japanese district of Düsseldorf, just off Immermannstrasse. With its shiny black ceramic tiles and colourful neon signs, it is a hybrid between toy store, art space and a café where you can find pretty much everything your inner child desires.
- Action figures, robots, Qee bears, labbits, comics along with coffee table books, vinyl records and premium poster prints – every item seems to be hand picked by shop owner Selim Varol. The gallery in the basement features a variety of more or less known artists from urban- and pop-art, lowbrow, surrealism and photography, just as Banksy, JR, Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Ricky Powell, KAWS, and D*Face. And though it is unlikely – if you ever should get tired in Toykio, you can just sit down and enjoy one of the best coffees in town at the very Brooklyn-like pastry bar.
- By Lukas Blasberg from METAL
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Pepperkakebyen. El pueblo de galleta de jengibre.
One of the food we normally associate with Christmas dates are ginger cookies. Along with rice pudding is one of the most typical christmas desserts that never miss in a table in Norway. Kids enjoy helping mothers to prepare cookies to eat them as a dessert with all the family.
Though the cookies with Gingerbread Man's shape –also known as Gingy- are the most popular, the true is that there are no limits when preparing these sweet creations made of ginger and aromatized with cinnamon or honey: they may be oven cooked like Santa Claus, christmas tree or even you may build up a whole city of them.
In Bergen they know this fact quite well. From Christmas in 1991, the city center -Torgallmenningen- becomes the sweetest place in the world with the creation of Pepperkakebyen- the Ginger cookie's biggest town in the world-. They create tiny little houses, trains, cars and ships made of ginger bread, candy canes and they use glass sugar to stick all together.
Everybody helps to make this ginger town grow up, from kindergarden children to school kids that contribute with their own creations. That is why every year Pepperkakebyen is visited by thousands of tourists attracted by its magic and who want to be wrapped with the christmas spirit. It will be open the whole month of December.
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more infoLa Casita Verde
Located in a charming valley close to the village of San José in Ibiza, La Casita Verde is a small nature and education centre run by volunteers that opens to the public every Sunday and where visitors can discover, in a direct and entertaining manner, that a more sustainable way of life is within reach of everyone.
The buildings that comprise La Casita Verde are made from such recycled materials as bottles, tin cans and wood. They include such alternative living spaces as a house in a tree, a house made from bottles and house built inside a lime oven. What’s more, the place makes daily use of alternative energy sources, such as the sun and the wind, and grows medicinal plants and herbs. That is why La Casita Verde exists as an educational tool to demonstrate alternative living techniques.
Besides being amazed by a pure hippy atmosphere, visitors will be able to enjoy some of the activities on offer: the chance to observe the preparation of healthy vegetarian food, learn how to prepare natural juices from local products (including aloe vera), take a one-hour tour around La Casita Verde, listen to (often live) atmospheric music, receive “natural beauty” treatments with masks made from aloe vera harvested from its own fields and many other interesting things.
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Goethehaus
German writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe on August 28th, 1749. The same house where he lived and wrote some of his masterpieces, right on Frankfurt’s oldtown, can be visit nowadays, after more than two centures, restored and in perfect condition. The four floors of the house are an invaluable testimony about society and life in Frankfurt in the 18th century.
Many of the exhibitis were removed for safety during bombings on the World War II but, after the house was rebuilt, these pieces returned in perfect condition.
All the information panels audio guides, on German and English, provide all the insights necessary to immerse the visitor in the Age of Romanticism.
The museum next to the house also worth a visit: beautiful artworks by Goethe and other artists from the same era, a a surprisingly good collection of late-18th and early-19th century art.
The house and the museum are open every day, from 10am to 6pm, Sunday and holidays till 5:30pm. Tickets cost 7€ (general) and 3€ (reduced price). Group prices and tours are available.
Picture by Mylius
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