Stockholm: Skansen & more new family

It was raining last time I went to Skansen, too. But this time we went for the spelmansstämma there on Saturday — Andrea’s and my first gig in Sweden! Sort of. Musicians get into the park free if they’re planning to play, and ESI paid our train fare there in exchange for taking over a short segment of stage time from someone else who cancelled at the last minute. (A whole lot of people, it turns out, had the sense to stay home out of the rain.) Our brief concert set was an extremely informal affair, with a tiny but very congenial audience, in a nice (dry) space whose primary purpose is to be a natural history museum.

The rest of the afternoon we did a lot of wandering around Skansen, listening to bits of concerts here and there. We heard an amazing couple of tunes by a riksspelman on cowhorn in the big church. We played some tunes with Maria (it turns out the Exec Director of ESI is also an alumna of a year-long fiddle course with Mats Berglund), and I joined in the session at the Folkets Hus briefly on our way by. At the end of the afternoon I wanted to go visit the moose, so we ended up doing a little zoo tour to watch the bears and the lynx cubs and various other critters.

After meeting my cousin Udo a couple of weeks ago, I was really looking forward to meeting his brother. The last-minute timing of our day-trip to town made it improbable, but Peter actually was able to come into the city from Sollentuna to meet us for dinner. We had a great trilingual conversation — speaking Latvian is a great rest for me after working so hard as a beginner in Swedish — and we all enjoyed getting acquainted. We also enjoyed the Thai buffet that Mills and I learned about on our previous rainy-day trip to Skansen (hi, Gustaf!). I am afraid that what with our scootling for the train afterward, we managed to miss the photo opp altogether, but I’m sure we’ll see each other again pretty soon.

Saturday was my highest snail-count of any day so far. The bike/foot path from ESI to the Tobo train station, about a 20-minute walk (15-16 if you’re in a hurry), is a great place to practice counting in Swedish, because there are almost always enough snails and slugs to merit counting. Slugs are sniglar (one is en snigel), and snails are skalsniglar (shell slugs). On the way to the station at about 11am, I counted 52 snails, and on the way home at about midnight, I counted 64.