Week 4

Back to Sweden

Back in Sweden our first stop was the city of Lynköping, which some of you may recognize from the song Sweet-ish.  Two days went much too fast, in my opinion.

Nice looking city, that Linköping.

Among other things Linköping offered many sights not common to us gringos.

Like hedgehogs...

...art, with uncut wangs...

...frikkin' 99% chocolate!!!...

...and the Holy Grail of cocoa-lovers everywhere: the 100. (for the record: it didn't taste especially good)

But of course they did have some things familiar to Americans Like food...

...shoddy craftsmanship resulting in unsafe sleeping conditions...

...vagrant roving dogs...

...and money.

We would not have the affinity for Lynköping were it not for this man, Daniel (and his "borrowed Bug"):

Next up was Uppsala where the house drum set had an image of Jesus on the bass drum and the U A H C (Uppsala Hardcore) initials around him. The flyer billed us as Descendents meets Weezer meets Weird Al (which are some pretty high compliments) but neither it nor the Jesus-on-the-bass-drum (oh yee-aya!) seem to win too many people over. I think it's especially difficult to rock when it is still light out, a problem in the far north during the summer since the sun never really goes down.  Some friends at the show invited us to another show downtown which we looked for but couldn’t find. Instead we passed by an army of NERDS, I mean people dressed like Jedis, on their way to the Star Wars premiere.

Then we slept in a very large, very empty room.

We woke up and headed for our last Swedish show, in Sandviken (which conversely contained no sand vikings).  We were the only band on the bill so it was no surprise that only 12 people were in the room when we started.  To make the evening more intimate we gave everyone name tags and pushed all the couches to the foot of the 'stage'.  Pretty much everyone in the room got at least one personal guitar solo crouch to the face from either Jack or me.  The whole audience stuck around when we finished and hung out for a couple hours and we sold as many shirts and CDs as we did as the almost-sold-out show in Stockholm, go figure...

An Evening With Love Songs

At midnight is was Bradley’s birthday and he was presented with a Swedish birthday song

download video - 1.3mb

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