Monthly Archives: August 2012

First week of school

Our course has begun! Everyone was here in time for Wednesday lunch, right on schedule. The rest of Wednesday was orientation, mostly in Swedish but with some of the general info about staff & facilities in English. We opened with a slängpolska demo (Olov on fiddle, Ditte on ‘harpa, Ami and Andreas dancing), and later […]

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Mills’s last day

Yesterday we went into Uppsala for the afternoon, on Mills’s last day before he had to fly home. Andrea and I had a few errands to do, but mostly we went for a walk around town and looked at fun things. We checked out the well stocked Myrorna thrift store, where Andrea bought a nice […]

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Eric Sahlström’s 100th birthday in Uppsala

Saturday’s packed agenda began with the 11am dedication of a museum exhibit about Eric at the Upplandsmuseet, in an upstairs room with central spiral staircase, a space that was really not designed with extreme overflow in mind. Outside, musicians were assembling for the spelmanståg, though in this case a tåg is a parade rather than […]

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Eric Sahlström’s 100th birthday in Tobo

Folks around here have clearly been working hard on preparations for this celebration for months, if not years. Day one was on Friday here in Tobo, and day two was on Saturday at a big venue in Uppsala. Nyckelharpa players came from all over the world, including Japan and the US, and many who couldn’t […]

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Andrea’s here!

She made it! Thanks in part to flying Iceland Air, because it turns out that the customs office there couldn’t care less why you’re going to Sweden or whether your student visa was successfully processed before the office went on summer vacation, and then when you get to Stockholm the Swedish customs desk doesn’t need […]

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Long day trip to Stockholm

On Tuesday we had a long productive day trip to Stockholm. We met with Daniel Fredriksson, who plays a nordic mandola made by Ola, and who very kindly agreed to meet with us at his office midday so Mills could try it out and get really great answers to all his questions. Afterward we wandered […]

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