Tjena,
I have been doing a lot of Swedish stuff the last week since my side trip to Spain. Actually within an hour of stepping off the plane, I was whisked away in a Volvo (the national car of Sverige) to my first Swedish wedding.
My personal Swedish designer fixed me up with hip suspenders and other nonsense that I complained about like a whiny 5 year old boy going to his first Swedish wedding. I endured introductions from two sides of a family that I didn't know and would probably never see again after 48 hours, a service in Swedish mixed with bad English songs on guitar by a great female pastor, and the toasts. Oh the toasts. I don't know Swedish, and the toasts lasted 3 hours, but was made far less than dreadful by copious amounts of buffet breaks and the occasional translation by my table neighbors. If you ever get a chance to go to a wedding where you don't know the language do it, as it will introduce you to a new level of facial feature and gesture observation and even understanding.
The wedding went without a hitch and the night was danced away, rocking the peaceful surroundings of huge pine trees, a tranquil lake and fields of blooming flowers, short green grass and other assorted fairy tale setting features.
Moving on to the next middle class Swedish tradition ... The Summer House. The summer house is a house by a lake/fjord/coastline that Swedish families gather to celebrate long hours of light during the summer, due probably to the lack of sun during the winter/fall/spring/every month of the year rather than July-August. Here, the infamous
Midsummer Celebration occurs with all its silly Swedish drinking songs, Schnapps in the amounts only Scandinavians can consume, and
some kind of dancing around a pole. I hope to experience this in late June and I will report back with interesting stories... Oh yes, but the Summer House. Karolina's parents in particular have been blessed by the old Nordic gods to have probably the most beautiful piece of property in the northern latitudes. Just an hour outside of Göteborg, there is a little house next to two other even littler houses in a small neighborhood tucked in the trees facing an enormous flank opening to a massive fjord. Its granduer of nordic beauty is unrivaled; upon arriving at the signature little
grass roofed houses, large steep mossy rocks give way to a blue-grey abyss, where one walks slowly to give awe-inspiring moments of catching your breath and to take it all in. As one with any experience of admiring nature beauty on a God scale, it is hard to take all in at once. Epic songs of deep sound echo through your head as you admire this place that awakens thoughts of "whoa". Your deep appreciation is only broke when you take off all your clothes and jump into a shivering shock of ice cold water and dive into laughter of being at this really cool place.
After coming back from the cosmos, a feast was prepared, made possible by fresh garden greens, a old school grill and a late sunset that makes you stick to your dinner chair far longer than necessary. The cold sets in, you start the fireplace and read like an old retiree after tending to a farm.
Life snapped back at me once I was back in G'borg where the city life of movies, out to dinner and a birthday were celebrated. The week piles up again for me, with cool plans/tasks of fixing bicycles for free in the park, finding old bicycles to restore, and cooking for a Friday graduation party filling up each day until I leave for a few days in Prague to visit my cousin...
toodles... from the abyss
teepee
No comments:
Post a Comment