Day 169: or The Day of Midsummer, Sort of

In our group of au pairs, we have a small number of Swedes. They decided to get us all together to celebrate midsummer, a week ahead of schedule, in true Swedish fashion. We all met around 6pm, and walked through a park to a small clearing, basically in the middle of the woods. They had a may pole set up and a smorgasbord of traditional Swedish food and drinks.

Smorgasbord

After we all got settled, one of the girls passed out song sheets and we all practiced our Swedish pronunciation and they taught us dances to go along with the songs. One of the silliest moments I've had in Franc, but it was quite fun. Everyone joined in and we all made equal fools of ourselves. After the singing, we dove into the food. W had many different types of herring and tuna and even boiled eggs with creamed smoked roe. Now, I love caviar, so I figured it would fall along the same lines. Boy was I wrong. I'll try anything once, and that was my once. I took a large bite, only realizing too late, that it was not at all what I expected. In my opinion, unexpected taste is almost as bad as as just having bad flavor. One of the Swedish girls happened to be looking at me, and I apparently didn't conceal my emotions very well. She started laughing uncontrollably, and I got the giggles and almost choked. Pretty standard situation really.

Red Team

After food, we all were divided into teams and played traditional relay games. Sack race, egg on a spoon, bat spin, and a couple others. We won the first one, but after a couple of unfortunate falls, landed in 3rd place overall. Good thing I'm not competitive. The rest of the night was spent hanging out on towels and blankets and being thankful that the rain that plagued us all day decided to stop exactly when I got out of my car. It was a really fun day and nice to enjoy someone else's summer festivities.


* The "sort of" in the title refers to the fact that we celebrated a week earlier than the actual Midsummer due to scheduling conflicts. To clear up any confusion.