The Swedish Way

So I'm still breathing and eating, and enacting most of the biological consequences and prerequisites that those entail and require, respectively.

We recently had a bout of warm weather up here. Last week and the week before were all clear blue skies and scorching hot sun. Good timing really, because it coincided with a great Swedish national tradition: taking more days off than you are really entitled to.

1st of May is Valborg, an ancient pagan festival day welcoming the spring . In modern Sweden it has a triple function: Valborg, workers day (May Day), and Swedish national hangover day (unofficial). It's a public holiday.

The day before is Valborgsmässoafton (roughly: Valborg eve) on which a bonfires are lit to scare away the wolves and trolls so the animals can go back to the fields. In modern times, it has a double function: Valborgsmässoafton and Swedish national underage drinking day (unofficial). It is not a public holiday, but everyone takes it off anyway (or at least the afternoon), and it's traditional to start the day with a champagne breakfast, and take things from there.

This year, Valborg fell on a Thursday, which made Friday a "soft day". In Sweden, if there's one day between a public holiday and the weekend, it's "expected" that nobody turns up to work on the day in between. Readers with a talent for arithmetic will have noticed that from one public holiday the great Swedish system has somehow crafted a five-day weekend. That this coincided with a beautiful spell of warm weather meant one thing: Barbeques Galore! (Not the shop, just a lot of barbeques.)

By Saturday, everyone was a bit disoriented, having had two days in a row that felt like Sunday, and trying to deal with the fact that it was Saturday again. That day the mercury bubbled over to 24 degrees, which I have it on good authority was warmer than it was in Vienna or Croatia that day. Of course there was only one reasonable response to this: BBQ at the lake.

There was still a sheet of ice remaining in one perpetually shaded corner, but I suspect that it's gone by now. It was great to lie in the sun all day and cook up some burgers (I'm slowly convincing the swedes to include beetroot and pineapple).

So for a few days, everyone was back to t-shirts, shorts, bare feet. But I became complacent. Up here, even in warm weather, one should always carry a jumper with them. On Monday I was walking around town jumperless when a chill wind came down from the arctic without warning. Since then I've had a pretty bad cold, but have been so busy I haven't been able to take any days off. Booo hooo.

Next Friday I'm back on the conference wagon, heading to LA and then the Netherlands for two robotics conferences. Schedule will be extremely tight, but hopefully I can meet up with The Duke and Case in Amsterdam. In July I go to Korea again, then Paul is coming up to Europe, and we're probably gonna hit up Croatia and Slovenia, a week in each. Looking forward to that...