Parents week!

As I write my parents are hurtling along in a small aluminum tube high above Canada on the way back to the US! They got here on Sunday morning, the 12th, and spent nearly a week here in Lund. That’s probably why I haven’t written a blog post – lots of parentsitting!

Before they got here though, I went to Malmö last Saturday to explore as I haven’t actually been yet! Here are some pictures:

Giant Harry Potter-like bushes in a park

 

The turning torso building near the coast
A famous sauna/bath house out in the ocean
Øresund Bridge from the Swedish side
USA! USA! I don’t really know what was happening here.

This week was the Lund Choral Festival which began on Monday. We went to as many concerts as we could and most were free! Our Monday consisted of two concerts and a delicious dinner of fish soup at a restaurant here in the market hall. It was rainy and a bit cold mostly all week so soup was a good choice!

Yum!

On Tuesday, the only day this week without rain, we decided to make a trip to Copenhagen! My parents had never been so we tried to see the main sights and some cool museums while there. We went to the National Museum of Denmark which had way too much ancient Danish and Viking things for one trip – but it was all very interesting to see! After the museum, we had lunch and went to the tower of Christiansborg Palace which I went to in August, but it’s free and offers quite a good view of Copenhagen so a second visit is still interesting. I lugged my heavy camera around all day but the only pictures I ended up taking were at the top of the tower! Here’s the bridge between Denmark and Sweden:

Very Scandinavian weather, too

The last three days of the week I had classes, so we didn’t do more traveling and just stayed in Lund. On Wednesday, I got my parents some Swedish meatballs because you can’t come to Sweden without them. Cool plating:

Also that evening we went to the Gala concert for the choral festival which turned out to be a three hour long concert with ~600 singers, an orchestra, two soloists, an emcee, and not one but two Dolly Parton songs. Yeah, what? There was lots of talking and joke telling in Swedish so we just sort of laughed with the crowd…one particular rendition I enjoyed was the theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly where the choir sang the trumpet part and sort of sounded like meowing cats. We were very confused by the time we left.

On Thursday we went to more concerts (so many!) and then to one of the best restaurants I’ve been to in my recent memory, and it was right here in Lund! I can say it was the first restaurant I’ve ever had cotton candy in…but I swear it was good!

Friday was pretty rainy as usual, so after my class we got some fika then walked around and went in different stores. I bought some candles (got to have something remotely warm in Swedish winter…) and a Swedish flag to put on my wall! Finally decorating a bit after two months, oh well. That night we went to a concert at the Cathedral which consisted of three Bach cantatas sung by a quartet and accompanied by period instruments. It was a really special experience to hear that music in such an old Cathedral.

My parents insisted they were well-traveled enough to figure their way back to the Copenhagen airport so I left them to it and slept in this morning. Spoiler alert: they made it!