Road trip to Lund
We made good time on the way to Kalmar. Since we had some extra time, we drove up and down the nearby island of Öland, which was pretty rural and rustic (windy, narrow roads through farmland, etc.). Kalmar itself was pretty good, with a nice balance of really old stuff and fairly new stuff. We spent the night there at a "Masonic hotel" (basically an independent hotel located in a building owned by the Masons). There was a Boston-style sports bar/restaurant next door; they had a scad of Boston-area memorabilia up on the walls, and I was considering sending them an MIT thing or two (to offset some of the Harvard stuff I saw there) until I realized that they're actually a big chain and they probably have someone in Boston buying them stuff by the box-full.
We spent the next morning driving westward to Lund (which is nearly on the opposite coast, just a stone's throw from Denmark). After getting situtated in our hotel (which was basically a dorm room), we spent a couple of hours walking down and around the main part of town, figuring out what was where.
The Real Group concert was that evening, and it was very good. Jenn, I'll give you all the details and the songs they sang and so forth, probably on a phone call once we get back to the states. We didn't get the chance for autographs and so forth (the Swedish audience was certainly nuts about The Real Group, but they didn't seem to be terribly autograph-oriented), so maybe I'll see what happens if I mail a request for autographs to the group. I didn't get to take a whole lot of good concert pictures because our camera has some pretty bright lights on it, which would have been distracting to the other attendees.
The next day (Friday) was our day to make some shorter road trips around the local area (Skåne). We headed eastward a bit to see Ales stenar and a reconstructed viking fortress at Trelleborg. After an abortive attempt to see the Oresund Bridge and a semi-frustrating drive to get out of Malmö, we returned to our dorm room in Lund, bought a bunch of junk food at the grocery store next door, and watched a bunch of Swedish television (with a little bit of Danish stuff thrown in in).
The next day being our last full day in Lund, we went to look at a couple of the touristy things in town (the culture museum and the cathedral). Then we went to a concert by the EVA Quartet (sorry, no good link available). They were phenomenally good, and getting to hear them in a live performance was amazing. The rather dissonant Bulgarian musical style was different enough that the audience didn't really know when to clap until the vocalists would eventually stand up a little straighter and smile.
As soon as that concert was done, we zipped northward to "Sjung gung" (literally "Sing swing"), a large-scale concert for a big children's choir (the choir was apparently assembled solely for the choral festival under which all these concerts were organized). The formula was basically that a featured group would come out to sing a couple of songs, and the massive children's choir (300-400 kids?) standing in the onstage bleachers behind them would sing along at certain points (on a few of the songs, anyway). We were really only there to catch a couple more songs by The Real Group, and the rest of the concert wasn't exactly up our alley; there were even a few numbers and associated antics from another a cappella group (not TRG; I won't bother linking to them here) that were pretty inappropriate for what was billed as a children's choir performance (yeah, nothing is more uplifting than hearing hundreds of Swedish kids sing about the wonders of Las Vegas showgirls). We also got to behold a song or two by a 14-year old Swedish pop singer, and we were duly troubled. But at least we can say that we finally got to see some back-up dancers doing their thing. And we got to hear The Real Group sing their rendition of Bach's "Air on a G string" (even if it was subsequently booed by the row full of eleven-year old girls sitting behind us). We left early, once we figured most of the TRG goodness had been sucked from the event's otherwise dry bones.
The next day was for packing up and heading back to Stockholm. We got a late start (after mistakenly thinking I had lost my wallet; we even went so far as to fill out a police report with a nice lady who had lived in Michigan for twelve years), but things went well all the same. We stopped by the lake Vättern, got into Stockholm around 9pm, returned our rental car, and stopped by a local (Danish-owned?) steakhouse for some "bøf".
Coming to Stockholm actually felt kind of like coming home (since we were already familiar with the surroundings), and we're taking it easy for these last two days in Stockholm. We wandered back down to the old town to see a couple parts we missed, and we browsed through a store or two for giggles. We'll do the same sort of thing tomorrow, and then we'll catch our flight out early on Wednesday morning.
There are a passle of photographs to upload, but I'll probably do that tomorrow night (because it'll take a good hour to pick them out and to write some quick captions). It looks like we've taken about 400 pictures since I uploaded the last batch.
So, pictures tomorrow, but this is probably the last update from Sweden. I'll post a "we're back safe at home" message at some point on Wednesday or Thursday, and you can always call us.
We spent the next morning driving westward to Lund (which is nearly on the opposite coast, just a stone's throw from Denmark). After getting situtated in our hotel (which was basically a dorm room), we spent a couple of hours walking down and around the main part of town, figuring out what was where.
The Real Group concert was that evening, and it was very good. Jenn, I'll give you all the details and the songs they sang and so forth, probably on a phone call once we get back to the states. We didn't get the chance for autographs and so forth (the Swedish audience was certainly nuts about The Real Group, but they didn't seem to be terribly autograph-oriented), so maybe I'll see what happens if I mail a request for autographs to the group. I didn't get to take a whole lot of good concert pictures because our camera has some pretty bright lights on it, which would have been distracting to the other attendees.
The next day (Friday) was our day to make some shorter road trips around the local area (Skåne). We headed eastward a bit to see Ales stenar and a reconstructed viking fortress at Trelleborg. After an abortive attempt to see the Oresund Bridge and a semi-frustrating drive to get out of Malmö, we returned to our dorm room in Lund, bought a bunch of junk food at the grocery store next door, and watched a bunch of Swedish television (with a little bit of Danish stuff thrown in in).
The next day being our last full day in Lund, we went to look at a couple of the touristy things in town (the culture museum and the cathedral). Then we went to a concert by the EVA Quartet (sorry, no good link available). They were phenomenally good, and getting to hear them in a live performance was amazing. The rather dissonant Bulgarian musical style was different enough that the audience didn't really know when to clap until the vocalists would eventually stand up a little straighter and smile.
As soon as that concert was done, we zipped northward to "Sjung gung" (literally "Sing swing"), a large-scale concert for a big children's choir (the choir was apparently assembled solely for the choral festival under which all these concerts were organized). The formula was basically that a featured group would come out to sing a couple of songs, and the massive children's choir (300-400 kids?) standing in the onstage bleachers behind them would sing along at certain points (on a few of the songs, anyway). We were really only there to catch a couple more songs by The Real Group, and the rest of the concert wasn't exactly up our alley; there were even a few numbers and associated antics from another a cappella group (not TRG; I won't bother linking to them here) that were pretty inappropriate for what was billed as a children's choir performance (yeah, nothing is more uplifting than hearing hundreds of Swedish kids sing about the wonders of Las Vegas showgirls). We also got to behold a song or two by a 14-year old Swedish pop singer, and we were duly troubled. But at least we can say that we finally got to see some back-up dancers doing their thing. And we got to hear The Real Group sing their rendition of Bach's "Air on a G string" (even if it was subsequently booed by the row full of eleven-year old girls sitting behind us). We left early, once we figured most of the TRG goodness had been sucked from the event's otherwise dry bones.
The next day was for packing up and heading back to Stockholm. We got a late start (after mistakenly thinking I had lost my wallet; we even went so far as to fill out a police report with a nice lady who had lived in Michigan for twelve years), but things went well all the same. We stopped by the lake Vättern, got into Stockholm around 9pm, returned our rental car, and stopped by a local (Danish-owned?) steakhouse for some "bøf".
Coming to Stockholm actually felt kind of like coming home (since we were already familiar with the surroundings), and we're taking it easy for these last two days in Stockholm. We wandered back down to the old town to see a couple parts we missed, and we browsed through a store or two for giggles. We'll do the same sort of thing tomorrow, and then we'll catch our flight out early on Wednesday morning.
There are a passle of photographs to upload, but I'll probably do that tomorrow night (because it'll take a good hour to pick them out and to write some quick captions). It looks like we've taken about 400 pictures since I uploaded the last batch.
So, pictures tomorrow, but this is probably the last update from Sweden. I'll post a "we're back safe at home" message at some point on Wednesday or Thursday, and you can always call us.
posted by Matt Libby at 5:13 PM
1 Comments:
Sounds like you guys are having fun! I just happened upon your blog while looking for information on Swedish baby food. My husband is from a small town called Gävler 10 month old in Nov and wanted to understand what types of baby food they have. You guys have fun and lycka till!
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