Dreaming of Freedom

It’s been a whirlwind week of work and St Lucia celebrations. Sweden is crazy about the festival and churches are full of small children dressed up as St Lucia in white dresses with red sashes. Large companies have their own candle lit processions and everyone is really up for celebrating it even if they are a little hazy on the origins. It’s like Guy Fawkes Night/Bonfire Night in England or Halloween in America. The costumes associated with the celebrations are the Lucia dress, sash and candle, or white dress and pointed cone shaped hat with stars on it, a gingerbread man costume, or a Christmas costume of red and white. It’s a calm sort of festival, the St Lucia song is beautiful and gentle and so it’s quite nice to have this celebration in the build up to The Holidays.

Apart from the obvious excitement at discovering Gingerbread Men costumes for the first time - other highlights of my week included a fika with Karin, the book club meeting and a Sue Townsend book. And in ‘other news’ - Keita and Mike sadly left us to return to England; Gothenburg is lit up with Xmas lights and cheered by buskers; and although it’s a bit cold there hasn’t been any ice all week so cycling is still nice and easy.

Although it’s dark outside and I’d rather curl up with P G Wodehouse I’m just about to go out to see an exhibition of work by first year students on the C:Art:Media course here. The work is exhibited at the Rotor Gallery at Valand School of Fine Arts, and will, I’m sure, be very interesting.

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The cultural festival was quite good. The city was heaving with people night and day. On Friday night we went to see Circo da Madrugada - Fallen From the Sky. It was a magnificent acrobatic, tightrope walking, juggling and fire breathing display. The story they structured all this around was based on a Brazilian legend - that every 500 years the angels are allowed to come down to earth and enjoy themselves for a night. The performers were fantastic. They swooped in on wires from the tops of the government buildings that surround Gustav Adolf’s Torg and entertained us for a good hour with their amazing feats. Fearless, they bounded up and down the huge dome shaped steel structure, swirled on ropes, swung on swings and made us all fall in love with the sheer beauty of their movements.
On Saturday we explored the numerous stalls and street performances that were dotted around the city including the medieval fair at the Cathedral.
And on Sunday we wandered into Liseberg seeing as there was free entrance to the theme park after 5pm. We’d so far failed to go in as it costs 70 sek to get through the gate and that doesn’t include any rides. We had a good look round the place and it was ok but I’m not really into theme parks. I was hoping I would manage to get one of the huge bars of chocolate that I see everyone walking around with but sadly you had to play a game to win them so my dreams went unrealized!

I’m continuing my punishing regime of a Swedish lesson a day and can now say a few sentences and recognise a few words and have even managed to say a couple of sentences to real Swedish speakers and had the pleasure of them understanding me.

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