Valborg- Walpurgis night

the parade

roma and a drunk swedish girl

sleeping on the street

Once a year on April 30th, the Swedes go crazy, drunk, and obnoxious for the whole day. Yes, this is Valborg, a pagan holiday from long time ago.
I am not really familiar with the traditions of the festival but one thing I know is that on this day, there will be huge fires celebrating the spring, or some sort, and people start drinking 10 in the morning until the next day.

Usually, the biggest parties happen in Uppsala since it has got a long tradition on this day, they have boat races, parades and all the student unions called "nations" will be open till 4 in the morning to host big parties with music and dance floors.

So I was all pumped to celebrate this festival and headed up to Uppsala after a morning class. When we got there, we saw huge lines in front of nations because of the Champagne meals you can get in the nations. You have people popping Champagnes all over the place and people eating herrings. What I have heard from Samy is that, well I sort of saw the people in the queues consisting of mainly hot blonde girls, so he told me all the girls were really drunk and he made out with three in one hour at the event.

Anyway, I met up with Clara and got the guestcards for the nations for the night and sat on the lawn chatting with her for a while. Meanwhile, there was this parade marching out of the university library directed by the principal. Apparently this is also the day for the graduates to march down the winding road to complete their graduation. They have almost the equivalent cap and gown but only neater. The caps looked somewhat like the police type of cap you would see in the movies. Anyway, Clara and I had a nice chat and she had to leave for else where so I walked with her back to her dorm and saw her place. It was really new and nicely decorated. You can't really imagine the streets in contrast with this room. Anyhow, I met up with Christophe and the others but only me and Christophe were sober enough to walk around in the city. So we did. Saw lots of people from Stockholm hanging on the streets so we said hi along the way and got some nice surprises- mainly free food.

Nothing happening until when the fire started to happen but we didn't know it was far away from the city center and no one was really motivated to move there. Instead we all got into MAX(a Swedish fast food chain) and had some burgers. People have been telling me how good MAX is because of the burgers. But after tasting them, I feel they are more like the cheap burgers you can get at Lidl (a cheap German supermarket chain). But after I had my dinner we started thinking that it was time to line up for the nation parties.

Actually not much to say about the party because it was quite typical as usual although we had to spend 220 SEK in total to get in one of those. It was a real disappointment although we talked with some girls who had some interesting backgrounds.

Needless to say Samy was his usual self hitting on every single one of girls in the house. He succeeded with some but only stayed on the conversation level. But then he turned into almost a malconfigured vacuum machine that is supposed to suck girls in but turned out to blow/ repel girls away. When you are watching him in action, you will see this crowd filled with girls and a guy named Moses parting the crowd into two.

After getting bored out of our minds at the nation, Christophe and I headed out to search for ways to go back to Stockholm since there was no more trains running. But we ended up sleeping in the chairs of a open-air cafe on the sidewalk for one hour before it got cloudy and cold. Then Christophe spot an open door into a condo so we tried sneaking in and finally found a floor in front of a business that won't open tomorrow and rested on the floor. It was quite intimidating when we heard the elevator running we hoped to God that it wasn't the owner of the business coming in on a holiday. But it turned out to be a woman downstairs who opened the door and asked "HELLO? HELLO?" and we never heard her close the door. Christophe seemed to rest pretty well since he started snoring not long after while I was keeping myself on the toes to listen to the surroundings.

After that we went out of the apartment and went in the station where we saw Samy and some others. That's when Samy was telling us all about his glorious stories but not managing to recall what happened to his forehead.