Midsommar Nights

When I look up to see the dark brooding clouds, am buffeted by the gale-force winds, am rained upon at 30 minute intervals, watch grown adults dancing around Maypoles and am surrounded by alcohol and fish it can mean just one thing: the middle of summer. This combination of weather and tradition is how Midsommar is celebrated every year in Sweden, which is where I’ve been for these last few days. Apparently the weather is always on the crappy side of the equation, yet the Swedes (or at least the ones I met) weren’t discouraged by this and celebrated in style. I was in Halmstad, on the south-west coast of the country, and got to celebrate in both the traditional and modern ways.

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I’d been invited to Sweden to celebrate Midsommar by my friend Kerstin. Kerstin invited her friend Eleonor and I to celebrate with Cornelia, her good mate who is from Halmstad. Halmstad seems like the perfect place to celebrate this occasion, which is possibly the biggest festival of the year in Sweden. Halmstad is big enough to have stuff to do, but small enough to retain a sense of local communities hanging out together. So first up, we climbed to the top of a hill to a little area where old Swedish buildings had been rebuilt to make a little mini-medieval Sweden. This was the location for the traditional festivities. When we arrived the locals were still building the giant Maypole, decorated with flowers. Lots of kids (and some adults) had floral wreaths in the hair, and people were dressed in traditional costumes and doing local dances. Then there were the waffles - glorious waffles! And beers down by the water. And lots of smiling, happy people. No time to linger however as we had to head out to a dinner hosted by our ridiculously lovely and generous hosts whose names I have embarrassingly forgotten. Terrible, I know, but I had been sleep deprived and drinking for far too long, so I will partially absolve myself of the blame. So much delicious food! Three different types of fish, salads, loads of Schnapps and much more. A really good, relaxed night.

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Before going to Halmstad I spent two fun days in the south-eastern town of Växjö, where Kerstin lives. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a more intimidating and unpronounceable town name in all my life!! Apparently the correct way is something like Vecq-wah, but it’s bloody lucky I didn’t have to ask anyone for directions on the way there, as in my mind I’d been trying out various combinations of Vack-shur and Veks-jor. Swedish – one tricky bugger of a language to learn. Anyway, Växjö is a pretty quiet little place, but I did have fun there. I arrived 15 minutes into the first half of Sweden’s not particularly pleasant 2-0 loss to Russian in the European Championships. I watched in a student pub filled with face-painted and dressed up Swedes and the mood in the pub afterwards was not the best. Everyone left pretty quickly though, and the abjectness of Sweden’s performance has since been cast in a better light by the fact that those self-same Russians dismantled the Dutch last night in an even better performance.

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The next day I saw all of Växjö’s tourist attractions. There’s only one actually, the Castle, and seeing that took approximately 194 seconds. It’s a nice castle, but only about 100 years old, so in the ranking of the world’s great castles, it comes somewhere below Newcastle, Kryal Castle (google it non-Australians, your lives will be enriched!) and that nasty South African Castle lager. That said, I do enjoy seeing a town for what it is, and had a nice walk around the place before meeting up with Kerstin and friends (Eleonor and Hillevi) for a pub quiz which we somehow didn’t manage to win. It was fixed, obviously.

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After an outrageously early start we headed for Halmstad and the aforementioned Midsommar hijnks which lasted through until Saturday morning, when I negotiated my way home. It was much harder than you’d think. I’d bought a horribly over-priced ticket for a train that apparently doesn’t exist and then had to talk my way on board an already sold out train to get back to Göteborg and then onwards back to Oslo. I eventually made it to Göteborg 4 minutes before my connecting train left, and after a mad dash made it just, just, just in time. I have just 36 hours back in Oslo though, as tomorrow I head up to Ålseund to celebrate Norwegian midsummer (which is confusingly called Sankthansaften, and held 3 days after the Swedish version) and visit the Geirangerfjord. Surely there is some Norsk god I can pray to for sunny weather this time?

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