I guess I'd better post, due to the impatience of others. Elin has too much time during her workday, as Chief Laboratory Researcher at GloboChem pharmaceutical, where she tests the pain threshold of newborn puppies. Golden Retrievers. In baskets. Naturally she gets bored of that and needs time throughout the day to read my blog. And now she's onto me again so I'm supposed to soothe all.
By talking about Valborg, a holiday which used to have a concept to it that's been lost throughout years spent in a hazy stupor. This year it made the unhealthy mistake of being held at the end of the weekend, the better to serve as a grand finale to the excess rather than a day in itself. Furtheremore it was hard to treat responsibly when we hear stories and whispering about it all year. Cooped up in the middle of December telling stories about when the glorious revolution will finally come, people talking about Valborg sounded like Baltic or Eastern European subsersives talking about when the beast will be crushed and the people will rejoice, but this time with the weather instead of the Soviet Union. So when the weather and the hype came together in tandem it produced a crescendo that made it the best holiday in Sweden. I've never been in an area of the world where the entire temperament of people completely changes with the season, so naturally I've never been a part of one holiday that represents that change.
And what's more, full sanction of approval is given to celebrate this holiday with the most debauchery possible. From my professor:
"Ever since I became a responsible citizen with children I've kept a healthy distance from central Uppsala during Valborg. But hey, someone's gotta go wild in order to honor the old traditions. Watch out for falling champagne bottles and enjoy yourself."
So for me it started out on Friday where I played a game of cups, the object of which was to throw beer caps into cups of beer and then see if they can get revenge on you, until someone gets up and thus loses. The biggest difference between here and in the US is that the game was played in the hallways of the Computer Science Department, between the classrooms filled with computer and technical equipment. My partner has the bladder of a pregnant woman so I had to play for two for an hour or so. Needless to say, that took up my night, so I had to wake up early the next day to drink beer on rock formations. Then went inside waiting for Daniel's friends to arrive smoothly: I didn't know them at the time but had I then it would have been known that they don't have the ability to accomplish things uneventfully, getting wasted before leaving Värmlands (save for the driver) then crashing and breaking a radiator and having a German truck driver in military fatigues tow them to the destination. So I go out that night to the pub and then went home, but an American friend had brought an American friend-later on we noticed the birds going at it and raising a ruckus shortly after 2, so this naturally exited us, so we decided to stay up through the night to hang out in the 3:30 sunrise. Birds in Sweden face a difficult climate-not only must they preserve enough food before the winter migration, they must stockpile enough amphetamines to get them to survive the perpetual eating and singing and copulating spring and summer ritual. They have no decency. In other nature news, butterflies also have no decency. Sitting on the rock yesterday, I noticed two butterflies just up and having sex in front of several of the finest Christian people you could ever meet. And they didn't have any shame whatsoever about it. They just migrated to Sweden, have sex in front of us, and do not even make the slightest attempt to learn the language. Anyway, me and the other very cool American had to stay up all night due to sun-not-going-down excitement, so it was up to us to drink coffee and other stuff and prepare the Valborg breakfast.
On Valborg breakfast, students traditionally are expected to consume Champagne with porridge, to represent that in spite of the poverty of students great thought and consideration is given to the alcohol. However, because we were a group of Americans, we could eat any damm thing we wanted because that is our right as American citizens, and no socialist tradition would stop us from having bacon and eggs with tortillas instead. But with champgane. So by 8AM everything is getting hazy so we go off to the park with a few thousand other students and sit on a blanket there. At this point a young Swedish woman who has previously been speaking to Daniel and Elin in front of me for 10 minutes in Swedish introduces herself once again as Ashley from Houston, Texas. I tell her I'm from near Brownsville so she tells me she's got friends there, and I ask her if she knows such and such, and she says of course and do I know such and such, and I answer affirmatively, and I ask her how her Swedish is coming along and then she introduces herself more specifically as Ashley Simpson, sister of Jessica Simpson. That lying bitch. The Simpsons are from Dallas.
Then we gome home and eat pizza and hang out at another party, where we meet genuine bonafide Swedish white trash couple. Man in black jeans and flannel and leather jacket vest and woman in wife-beater and darker bra. By that time it's nighttime again so we go out on the roof, then I get excited again and stay up again till the sun rises at 3:30. Then I go to bed a few hours later. By this time I'm cranky and have only simple requests which still don't satisfy me: I reminded myself of our Madison company slightly before heading to the airport that time in Austin, or a small child slightly before bedtime on Halloween night, having gorged on candy and suffering the worst sugar-crash possible: I was hungry but I didn't want to eat, I was tired but I didn't want to sleep, I wanted more fun but without the energy to party.
Sweden has returned to normalcy again. Yesterday I read and understood four newspaper articles in Swedish. I had a normal length Swedish conversation the other day with Maya and apparently made sense. Today I played football (soccer) and discovered it was more tiring than I could remember. Also it's apparently a sport that does take practice after all, so my awesome American soccer skills weren't up to muster. Then I went home and ate meatballs with potatoes and lingonberry. These days Swedish people hang out on the lawns or barbeque or play football, usually with not much clothes on.
