Valborg

The last week in April is always a special one in Sweden filled with many festivities, parades, and most of all parties! In Sweden April 30th marks the celebration of Spring and warm weather to come! The stores all close super early, so everyone can go out and see the parades that all the university students throw.

I went to the parade in Gothenburg which is one of the biggest ones in all of Sweden. The streets were PACKED with people all eager to see what the students this year have come up with for their floats. The university students prepare for this parade all year long. They split up into about 50 groups and come up with a “theme” for their floats. These themes range from political messages making fun of the government, song floats that dance to popular songs, etc. Quite a few of them mentioned USA actually, not necessarily in the best lighting though. Here are some pictures from the parade.

After the parade ends (this one happened to be over 2 hours long), everyone heads to a giant forest for more fun festivities such as live music, food, and a giant bonfire. People laugh and sing these crazy Swedish songs while dancing all around the bonfire. It was quite the sight to see. Most people spend take full advantage of this holiday and spend the whole night out drinking, singing, and dancing with friends. Especially in my city, Varberg, I could still hear people out on the streets at 4 am!

Luckily for the Swedes they can all sleep in the next day because May 1st is “International Workers Day”, so the whole country gets the day off to recover. Another very Swedish tradition to do on May 1st is to go out and have the first outdoor “fika” of the year in the forest which is exactly what I plan on doing today.

After a lazy morning, the whole family plus MorMor are going to drive to a big famous forest to have a nice picnic/fika this afternoon. After that my friend Ellen is coming to spend the night, and tomorrow we are going to meet up with a bunch of my Swedish friends and have a BBQ on the beach.

Saturday I will finally be doing some “Pratik plats” (job training) as well at the famous lilla bruket company (here is a link to the website – lillabruket.se) that started right here in Varberg and has grown into a world wide brand! I am so excited to have such an amazing opportunity and will post all about it on Sunday.

Hope everyone has a lovely rest of their week, crazy to think that it is already May! This will be my last full month in Sweden 🙁 – time is going by too fast.

Swedish Word of the Day – “tuggummi” – gum! This one just makes me laugh, it seems more Chinese to me than Swedish.