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Published: June 27th 2005
Sitting down for lunch
We sat at a long table decorated with flowers and maypoles.Tradition overload. I was bombarded with Swedish stereotypes this weekend!
Midsummer is a Swedish pagan festival to celebrate the longest day of the year and the beginning of summer. Traffic is horrendous as everyone evacuates the cities for the country (prefereably near water).
Linn and I drove to Uppsala on Thursday night (that's where she goes to school and has her apartment) after standing in lines at the grocery store and the liquor store. We went for a long walk through the woods in Uppsala to collect wildflowers to make our crowns. The crowns are made of birch branches and you tie the flowers on with string.
Friday we picked up Linn's friend Stella and drove to a camp ground (with really cute cabins) near Gävle.
We had lunch around 1:00. It consisted of: meatballs, potatoes, lax (raw salmon), sil (pickled herring), hard bread, buns, hard boiled eggs, and of course snaps (a vile tasting, extremely strong hard liquor... worst shot ever... yes, even worse than whiskey... I cried the first time). Each shot of snaps was preceded by a song.
After lunch we were split into 4 groups of 6 (there were 27 of us
Midsommar kräns!
My crown of flowers. in total)... Each team had one 'mole' who was trying to make the team lose. The goal was to get the most points, or to guess who the mole was in each group. We did obstacle courses, played soccer, and had 10 skill testing questions. It was pretty fun (see pictures)... especially after having all those shots of snaps!!
We then headed to the beach for a swim... haha... it was a little too cold, so only a few people actually went in... Instead, there was a game of beach volleyball organized.
By the time we got back to the cabins it was pretty late... I was exhausted, so I had a short nap. We ate dinner around midnight (the darkest time of the night)... pork chops and vegetables cooked in tinfoil, followed by cheesecake and BBQ'd bananas.
A few of the guys who were there knew how to do fire tricks, so we had a little show.
And THEN, we had a sauna. Now, for all you people who have had sauna's in Canada... this is NOTHING like it. It was boiling. You almost couldn't breathe when you were sitting in there.
We went to
The obstacle course
I'm trying to run around a stick 10 times... eep. bed around 3:30am.
The next morning, we got up, cleaned, ate breakfast, and then lounged around for awhile in the sun. We ended up going back to Fritjöv's house (a friend of Linn's) for dinner and a movie. We arrived back in Uppsala at midnight on Saturday.
Overall, it was really fun... The weather was on and off (it rained a bit, but was nice for most of the time, although chilly at night). There were some really interesting people there... one of them is a professional snowboarder in Austria (Hans), and another is a really good videogame programmer (David).. he apparently did the 'Chronicles of Riddick' game.
You guys should all mark your calendar for next year, because I'm definitely throwing one of these parties!!
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Foodbag
non-member comment
mmmm...food
Any chance some of this food could be FedExed over here...I'll give it a good home.