Category Archives: Journal

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 […]

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 […]

On the third Sunday in August, the little town of Älvkarleby celebrates its famous historic nyckelharpa player: Carl Ersson Bössa, known as Byss-Calle, who lived from 1783–1847. His tunes are among the best beloved in the nyckelharpa canon. I hadn’t been intending to perform, but it turned out that really anyone who comes with an […]

Gunnar and Maria had the perfect idea for a Saturday outing: Drottningholm, the queen’s castle, is on the other end of the same island, thus right on our way back home through Stockholm. We borrowed their bus passes to get there (and nope, this is not one of the routes where they announce the stops […]

The way this one came about is: a couple of years ago, Andrea & I were playing Swedish fiddle tunes at the Brattleboro farmers market with Mary & Susan, and someone we’d never met before came up to say that he was visiting from Sweden, and that we were playing tunes from his childhood village […]