The longest day of the year...

We spent the longest day of the year, as hoped, in Stockholm. As I mentioned before, it was a bit of a let-down, since we barely saw the sun! But no worries, because according to our guidebook* the big midsummer celebration in Sweden happens the Saturday after the solstice. So, in search of better weather, we headed south to Malmo to take in the Big Event. The drive from Stockholm to Malmo is about 6 hours, and really boring. It rivals driving across Iowa. To keep ourselves occupied, and awake, we wrote a song in GarageBand. You can hear it (assuming I did this right). It's not finished, but if you try to imagine the same thing going on for oh, another five hours or so, you'll get the idea!

We arrived at the campground in Malmo around 6:30 on Friday. It was full of folks celebrating the midsummer. The celebration seemed to include a pole similar to a Christian cross but with rings around the two horizontal pieces and decked out in foliage and Swedish colors, and for many people a game we call "Stick and Castle", where teams try to knock over each other's wooden castles by tossing sticks at them.

Wandering away from the campground and towards the beach, we found the "Tivoli" - a basic carnival, but with something very intriguing called the William Arne Motorcirkus, with the "Wall of Death". We were intrigued, but had missed the last show for the evening...

So the next morning, we went in search of the big Midsummer Festival... We rode into downtown Malmo, which was completely dead. Asking around, we found that the celebration was actually on Friday night, and that it consisted mainly of the carnival. Darn, we thought there would be fireworks and free concerts! It makes us realize that Seattle has a pretty darn good summer festival(s), between FolkLife, Seafair and Bumbershoot!

Anyway, Malmo is a pleasant place, with nice parks and some interesting redevelopment in the old port, including a 45 story building (the tallest in Sweden, I'm betting). We found their version of the "soundgarden" - a circular earthworks near the port redevelopment with speakers in its berm. And on our way back to the campground we stopped at the tivoli for the William Arne Motorcirkus!

You may have seen this type of thing on the Discovery Channel as some sort of historic novelty. It's a wooden cylinder held together by cables and rope. The spectators stand around the top (I don't think there are any spectators in the Discovery Channel version), and crazy people (oops, I mean trained professionals) ride motorcycles around the cylinder, held up by centripetal force. As they drive around, the entire arena bends and flexes, which makes it even more fun!

Anyway, I THINK we experienced Midsummer in Sweden... Unfortunately, it was dampened by the Swedes' loss to the Germans in the World Cup game Saturday.

-SK
a Amsterdam


*Lonely Planet's Europe on a Shoestring, aka "the Bible"