One Morning In May (James Taylor)

The Swedish love the sun and warmth that Spring and Summer provide. Spring is welcomed in with “Majbrasa”. Majbrasa is held the last day of April every year and according to Wikipedia, is also known as “Walpurgis Night”. Every community has some kind of celebration, which generally ends with a huge bonfire. Grimnäs celebrated with a dinner, fireworks and a bonfire.
Our village is divided into 3 sections. Each section takes turns hosting the different events throughout the year. We live in the western section, and it just so happened that it was our sections turn to host Majbrasa. Whoever hosts these celebrations is responsible for food, entertainment, raffle prizes, etc. We held a meeting to decide on the menu (pyttipanna, salad, bröd och torta), drinks (öl, silt, vin, te och kaffe), how much food would be needed, the raffles and who was going to organize the fireworks and bonfire. Since I like living on the edge, I threw in a suggestion for a game. “Gissa Vem” or in engelska, Guess Who? The object was to guess who was who from their child or baby photos and win a prize. It was well accepted, so Lars and I collected baby photos from the “Wild Westerners”, scanned and printed them out.
This was my first official village event. I was nervous. I wanted everyone to like the game and well, to like me too. We met up at the people house and set up the tables, make coffee, get everything in order. The food was pre-cooked by different members and brought in large thermoses. I set up the game and tried to not look as nervous as I was.
As more and more people arrived, we quickly realized we were running out of food. Lars started cooking more pyttipanna on the stove. People were starting to play Gissa Vem and it was comical when someone would go up to a Westerner and look them in the face closely trying to determine which photo was of them. Raffle tickets were being sold for prizes also provided by the hosts. After dinner it was clean up time, then bonfire and fireworks.
The bonfire was huge and very warm. I stayed close to it as I was cold, as usual. Everyone was gathering to see the fireworks display. In Florida, you can’t buy serious fireworks without having some kind of a pyro-tech’s license. In Sweden, we don’t need a stinking license! We had Johan. He was very good at lighting the wick and hauling ass! They have major fireworks here in comparison to the states. I was impressed.
No one was able to guess all the photos correctly, so we had to pick the 2 highest guesses. Then we had a tiebreaker. Afterwards, we taped our baby photo to our shirts and showed everyone who was who. There were a lot of laughs. I think everyone was having a good time.

Time In A Bottle (Jim Croce)

Boy, time flies when you aren’t blogging! I apologize for the lapse in writing. I am getting more comfortable with my new surroundings and try to venture out more. Spring came and apparently isn’t in any hurry to leave. To the natives, it is warm. To me, it is still a little too chilly. I have done some planting. I will see if I can grow some tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkin, sugar snap peas, carrots, salad and herbs. I had a pretty nice garden when I lived in Pennsylvania and hopefully I will have the same here.Meanwhile, let me catch everyone up on my adventures in Sverige.