lydia's musical adventures in Sweden, 2012–2013

(We are supposed to call it Gothenburg in English, but I think Göteborg sounds nicer.)

Mills flew out to spend a week with me during winter break! He arrived on Xmas day, slightly the worse for wear after an airport-food adventure, but he perked up again by the next morning. We stayed with our friend Urban — whom we met in Borås last summer, because he was traveling with Jan, whom I’d met in Rättvik in 2005. Urban had said we could borrow his apartment for a couple days, as he and his daughter Hannah would be away for some of the time anyway — but we ended up staying at his place the whole week, thanks to their extraordinary generosity.

Mills and I did a lot of walking around the city and a fair amount of museum-ing. I think I’ll try to break the bits out into separate posts, because there are lots of photos!

To start us off, here are some of my favorite mostly-architectural pics from around town. Lots of great design! Beautifully crafted buildings, walk- and bike- and baby-buggy-friendly streets, separate traffic channels for mass transit. Plus, slightly off-topic: a rainbow of shopping bags that fold up into bunnies!

(Click to view larger image, click again to magnify)

I was very pleased to be able to spend Christmas Eve (the main celebration day) with my Swedish cousins near Göteborg, in Swedish! I’d met Udo and Alexander in August; this time I also got to meet Udo’s daughter Lina and ex-wife Susan, since their tradition is to celebrate the holiday together. They were all wonderfully welcoming and I felt warmly included, not the least bit like an awkward orphan. Plus, although I don’t necessarily understand every word all the time, conducting entire days in Swedish makes me feel all accomplish-ful, so I am especially grateful to the friends who are willing to roll with that.

We had a lovely afternoon together: a festive dinner, a nice long walk, gifts under a tree and lots of snacks — all just like my other family! Though, one prominent difference of tradition: the parceling out of parcels. In my mom’s family we have an evidently unusual system of opening presents — the labels are hidden; each person, in order of age beginning with the youngest, takes a turn choosing a wrapped present from under the tree; the selecter then identifies the intended recipient and hands the present over for that person to open; repeat until the supply is finally exhausted. This year we began instead with an interesting discussion about who gets to be the tomten (Santa Claus, more or less) this time and hand out presents, based on who is the beard-iest. (Alexander won.)

Contrary to the predictions from school, it turns out that not every household in Sweden watches Kalle Anka (Donald Duck, the 1958 Disney Christmas special thereof) on Julafton after all: we didn’t. Though the subject did come up.

Over dessert, we observed another tradition: the scratching off of lottery tickets, two apiece as a gift from Udo. (My tickets didn’t win. Two of the tickets won 30 SEK, which is the price of a ticket — so although we can tell who’s really winning here, it was still fun, so there.) And then we played Yahtzee and Connect Four until it was suddenly time to go home.

Lina and Susan and I all took the same train back into town. They invited me to join them also on Christmas day, but I had a prior engagement because Mills was already on his way here!!

We were lucky to get special student-price tickets for this show, using a super-secret code that finally materialized after several rounds of followup questioning. I went with Matilda; ‘most everyone else had already headed home for the holidays. This concert is an annual gig (a tradition! touring to several cities) for a high-power lineup of luminaries in the folk scene — Ale Möller, Lena Willemark, Esbjörn Hazelius, Roger Tallroth, Lisa Rydberg, and Olle Linder, with this year’s special guest Louise Hoffsten (who is mostly active in rock, blues and pop). It seems like the audience is predominantly not folkies, though, perhaps not least because the cheap seats run about $70. It actually felt a little weird to be at UKK in a context where we weren’t all carrying our nyckelharpas.

Evidently folk music concerts require smoke machines and fancy lighting changes — saw this in Linköping and it was the same deal here. This time, though, we also got nice candle lanterns on the front of the stage to make it look folk-y and xmas-y. The two aesthetics make for an interesting combo. Personally I find any of these players just as brilliant when they are not in a cloud of blue smoke.

I enjoyed the concert. There were definitely stunning performance bits, and the whole show was highly polished. I was a little disappointed, especially in the first half, that the whole production seemed a little light on both the Jul and the Folk — it felt more pop-y and folk-lite, especially after I’d been primed by Ulrika Bodén’s concert. But these Swedish folk musicians sure take their multi-instrumentalism seriously: it was most entertaining to watch Ale play umpteen instruments (sometimes two simultaneously or nearly so), though everyone else put in an impressive effort in that department too. Anyone else ever seen Lena play a drum set? Also fascinating to see the skillfully orchestrated stage changes between whole-group and smaller-group numbers.

Other memorable bits: I’d not encountered Olle Linder before and was much impressed, even before we got to the surprise hambone number. Ale told a funny poignant story about how, when he was 8, he hit upon the xmas gift idea of crocheting a nose-warmer for his grandpa, which was then not received with anything like the appreciation he’d hoped. There was a reading of listener-submitted limericks, some of which evidently won their creators a free ticket to the show.

Pics are kinda blurry because we were way up in the balcony.

Lots of snow! Y’know how when you make a gingerbread house, sometimes the icing that is supposed to be snow gets all gloopy, and then it looks too improbably droopy to represent real snow? That’s what the roof of the Annex (our dorm building) has been looking like. But then the snow starts to slide and come crashing off in big sheets. Then it looks rather less like (and makes rather more noise than) icing. It is quite entertaining.

Also including a pic of my pet icicles — which were callously knocked down before the concert, before I could see whether they would really make a whole sheet of ice in front of the window (sadly did not get a pic of the height of their career) — and another pic showing what the back of Niklas’s car looked like when he arrived from Järvsö after spending several hours on snowy roads. Plus, finally managed to get a couple pics of the birds who visit outside my window; they usually don’t sit still long enough for my camera to focus.