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Tag archives for holidays

Music festivals that go green

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Way-Out-West

The people behind Way Out West do their best to think green when they fill the park Slottsskogen in Gothenburg with music. This year with artists like Prince, Kanye West and Robyn. Photo: Sima Korenivski / GFC

The Swedish holiday season is soon about to take over this country. After having celebrated Midsummer on Friday, most of the country tunes into summer mood.

One sector that tunes up its level though, are the music festivals. Summer is the time to enjoy live music in the open, whether it’s classical music or rock, whether it’s at a big city festival or a small obscure independent thing in the middle of a forest.
Lately more and more of these festivals have started putting a bigger focus on the sustainability aspects, considering that gathering thousands of persons at one place, providing food, drinks and sanitation for everyone, can mean quite a big environmental impact.

Here are some of the ones that have put an extra effort in an environmentally conscious profile:

* Mossagårdsfestivalen (web site only in Swedish) June 17-19. This summer’s first green music festival took place already last weekend. Mossagården is an organic farm in the South of Sweden selling vegetable food-boxes, but once a year they arrange a music festival at the farm with free horsecarriage-taxi from the local bus station and organic food.

* Urkult August 4-6. One of the first green music festivals in Sweden. This year will be the 17:th time that the festival will be held above the ancient carvings at Nämforsen rapids in the North of Sweden. Urkult has urine separating toilet, all food served there is organic and all tdisposable products used are compostable. The festival has its own compost at a nearby field.

* Way out West August 11-13. This festival, held in the largest park of Gothenburg, is active in the development of an environmental certification system for eventmakers. The food is organic, the energy renewable and as a city festival Way Out West doesn’t even have a camping, partly with the argument that a city provides a lot of good existing green infrastructure, so why not use it instead of transporting people and material to a distant place to construct something temporary?

* Saltoluokta folkmusikfestival August 10-14 . One of Sweden’s few festivals in “roadless land” at the Saloloukta Mountain Station on the border of Laponia, with focus on Sweden’s Northern cultures. Get there by a small boat, sleep on a reindeer skin in a sami tent and learn how to joik , (the traditional Sami way to sing).

* Kosterfestivalen July 23-29. Chamber music in the Koster Gardens, that normally serve organic slowfood produced in the gardens. The idea is to combine art, music and nature at a beautiful spot by the sea on the Swedish West coast.

Saltoloukta-folkmusic-festival

Saltoloukta Folk Music Festival couldn’t get much closer to nature, literally speaking. Photo: STF.

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

June 23, 2011

It’s, like, National Day or whatever

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A lot of my posts over the last couple of months have had something to do with holidays, which might give you the impression that this country has a lot of random celebrations. This impression would be 100% true.

Not only that, there is an incredible number of Christian holidays in this ambivalent-towards-religion country. For example, last Thursday was Kristi Himmelsfärds Dag, or Ascension Day in English. This holiday celebrates, as we all know, the ascension of Jesus into heaven, which occurred forty days after he rose from the dead on Easter. As far as I can tell, the biggest celebrations taking place that day were by university students who had finished their last exams the day before—not the most pious of celebrations, might I add.

Most adorable baby in Swedish folk costume ever! Photo from littlescandinavian.com


Fast forward to today: National Day. I’m imagining fireworks, parades, marching bands, orchestrated explosions…

Not so much. I’ve asked a lot of friends about National Day–what it means and how they’ll celebrate–and the response has been the equivalent of a collective “Meh.” People are not that into it! Not exactly what I expected.

As it turns out, National Day is one of the few holidays in Sweden without much history or tradition. It only became an official holiday in 2005, which is part of why people are at a loss as to how to celebrate it. No one grew up with it, and it seems a little forced in comparison to all the other longstanding holidays. Before 2005, National Day was just called “Flag Day,” and you didn’t get time off from work for it, which obviously means its not much of a holiday.

As for the date, usually chosen for meaningful reasons, it commemorates both the election of Gustav Vasa as King in 1523, which “laid the foundation of Sweden as an independent state,” and the ratification of the 1809 Constitution, which established civil rights and liberties. Both fine things, but sort of lacking the punch and rah-rah value of, say, kicking the British back across the Atlantic, storming the Bastille, or something of that nature.

Plus, for some reason Swedish people seem a little skeptical of the whole “overt nationalism” thing that goes along with a national day. It’s one thing to get all “Well, yes, we solved poverty and invented Skype and if only you would let us be in charge of the UN we could probably fix the world too.” It’s another to march around saying “Boo-yah Sweden.” I don’t quite follow the reasoning, but when you are persistent in asking questions about this you hear some mutters about right wing parties and not wanting to be associated with bad people. It seems like there’s this quietly-enforced restraint in celebrating “Swedishness” too vehemently.

By far the most exciting part for me are the folk dresses. The royal family always celebrates in Stockholm, and Queen Silvia totally rocks a Swedish folk dress. Thank goodness for Lola being in Stockholm to document the royal family Swedish folk dress mania… wish I could have been there to see it myself. Instead, I just got to daydream about the dress I’m going to buy my poor first born when the time comes. How cute is that little baby??

Kate Reuterswärd - Expat

June 6, 2011

Waffle Day: The Good, the Bad, and the Sold Out

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Imagine you live in a magical, far-away land. A land clothed in graceful swathes of Lollipop Woods and Gumdrop Mountains, populated by chocolate monsters and gingerbread people. Imagine a world where licorice is king and waffles get their own holiday… Oh wait. Sorry, that’s Sweden.

In a totally improbable turn of events, Sweden celebrates “Waffle Day”—an unofficial holiday whose sole reason for existing is a phonetic mix-up—on March 25. This year, my Waffle Day (or Våffeldagen) started in Swedish class. At that point, I wasn’t even aware of the significance of the seemingly-ordinary Friday. What a fool I was! An innocent! A naïve!

Fortunately, my Swedish class is not exactly, shall we say, “goal-oriented,” so we spent quite a bit of time discussing Waffle Day and its history in Sweden. Waffle Day was never intended to be a holiday as such, but March 25 is nine months before Christmas, and therefore a feast day for the Holy Mary. In Swedish, “Our Lady” is “Vår Fru,” and if you mumble determinedly enough, “Vår Fru” sounds a lot like “Våfflor,” which means waffles. Vår Fru Dagen becomes Våfflor Dagen, and all of a sudden Sweden has a Waffle Day.

Being the foreigner that I am, I find all this a little difficult to grasp. Like, you mean to tell me that people just started mispronouncing the name of a religious holiday en masse, and then they just kept going with it? Did they all just collectively say, “Meh. I like waffles better than church anyway?” Is this really possible?

I don’t know what the opposite of “the heights of religious fervor” is, but I think that Waffle Day comes pretty close.

I’ve also read that Swedes celebrate Waffle Day because it’s spring and back in the olden days, they were happy to finally have fresh milk and eggs, but I’m not sure I really believe that. If that were true, it could be “Practically Any Freshly-Baked Bread-like Item Day.” Plus, the Waffle/Our Lady thing seems a lot more convincing.

After discussing the Waffle Day situation for almost a half hour in class, we were instructed to write an essay on whether men or women drive better, and since I don’t really feel that passionately about the topic, I spent most of the next hour and a half thinking about waffles.

I rallied the troops—two other American girls with Swedish boyfriends—and we went off in search of a Real Cultural Experience. Unfortunately, we met with more disappointment than success. We went to Ebbas Skafferi, a really great café and coffee spot in Lund where I was sure they would have waffles. After confirming that they were on the menu for the day, we each ordered one… only to be told that the Swedish waffles had been sold out for the day and that all they were currently serving were Belgian waffles. The horrors!

Our Belgian waffles did not meet expectations.

We’re not that picky, so we ate them anyway. It felt a little wrong, though.

Waffles! A Real Cultural Experience! (Almost.)

Fortunately, I was soon able to rectify the Belgian waffle snafu. Our friends Gustaf and Malin invited us over for dinner on Saturday, and in honor of an extended Waffle Day weekend, they suggested that we have waffles for dessert. I got unreasonably excited (At last! Real Swedish Waffles!), and then Malin and Gustaf realized that they weren’t really sure where their waffle press was since they just moved. They started going through some boxes, but to no avail. Not being the type to give up, though, they decided to just buy a new one so that we could go through with the plan.

Malin didn't let a silly thing like not having a waffle iron stand in her way.

At last! Real Swedish waffles! A day late, but just as delicious as expected.

 

——

To see some photos of “real Swedish waffles” with an American twist, check out Lola Akinmade Åkerström’s “Chicken and Waffles, Swedish Style,” also from blogs.sweden.se.

Kate Reuterswärd - Expat

March 28, 2011

Going for a Swecation

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Lake-Abisko

Lake Abisko. Photo: Alexandre Buisse/Sweden.se

July means holidays in Sweden. Things might have changed a bit since the time when all the industries closed down all summer, but you can still notice a remarkable drop in activity. Newspapers become thinner and write features from the beach, public authorities change their opening hours and asking for the way in central Stockholm becomes a difficult task since most of those who walk the streets are visitors.

Both the financial crisis and the idea that flying around the world isn’t the best thing to do for the climate seem to have led to a trend of what some newspapers wittily call “Svemester” (as a mix of Sverige – Sweden – and semester – holidays). Recently I read an article claiming that every third Swede had dropped their plans to go abroad on holidays and instead stayed within the country.

And why go away when we – at last! –have a bit of sun and warmth? Last year camping was the fastest growing branch of the tourism sector in Sweden. One can also spend a few days at one of the hundreds of youth hostels that are scattered in beautiful places that no one has ever heard of. Another way of getting to know a new place is staying on a farm.

The new challenge of the climate pilots that I have written about before is to find exciting things and good ways to relax close to home. And I myself am also going for Swecation this summer – although with such a long-shaped country as Sweden you can go very far without crossing its borders. Right now I am packing my bags and getting ready for the 15 hours long train trip to Kiruna, where I will go trecking in the mountains. But sitting here, in a summer dress and sweating in 25 degrees, trying to prepare while the weather forecast tells me that the night temperature yesterday was minus 2 degrees Celsius in Nikkaloukta, it’s almost as if I were going to a new country…

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

June 30, 2010