01.15.07
Posted in Etzling, Hollidays at 3:28 pm by tesstess
On the 29th of December I went with Ryanair from Gothenburg to Frankfurt where Anthony picked me up. From Frankfurt it was approximately a two hours drive to the small village where his parents live and where he also spent all his childhood just a few kilometers from the border to Germany.
This is the street where they live.
Here is the house, fully decorated for Christmas, and it was so beautiful at night with all small lights. I tried to get them on picture but my pictures of this looked more as a black heaven with stars than a house.
The garden was beautiful now in winter so I can imagine how it must look in summer filled with flowers.
We celebrated new years eave with Anthonys parents in their house.
This is the new year dinner. I don’t remember now exactly what all the food was I ate this weekend, and which was at which evening. The reason is that we ate a lot, big wonderful dinners both at lunch and late evening all the days, often with both a glas of champagne before and allways wine to the food.
At twelve o’clock it was time to shoot the fireworks. But, it was raining a lot…
But we stayed happy anyways. The men went out in the rain to fire the things, and just when it was time me and his mom went out to look up at the sky to see the fireworks.
Anthony hurt his thumb on the thing they used to light the fireworks.
We had time to visit both sets of grand parents and some cousins. On this picture we are at the house of the grand parents on his fathers side. Here I remember very well what I ate because it was frog legs! Not so bad as I had feared, but when you start thinking about what it is and looking at them closely the stomach don’t want to have more of them. I would say they tasted like a mix of chicken and fish. And the sauce was very good, people say the sauce is the reason to why they eat them in the first place.
I was so proud here because I managed to speak some sentences in french and I understood when she told me things, and I could ask questions back! I felt it was much easier here to try to speak french when I knew she didn’t know a word of english.
Here are the grandparents on the mother side. These are the ones I met once before when they went down on hollidays to the south of France and came to eat with us in Valbonne one day.
Two of the days me and Anthony went out for long walks.
First we went out in the nature just beside the village where they lived.
We climbed an “älgtorn”, but here they are not for mooses as in Sweden but for rabits and hm. rådjur (bigger brown animals with white on the bottom).
The other time we took the car and visited “Le petit Pierre”, one hours drive from Name.
At some places in the woods there are funny mountains. Here they used the mountain to not have to build all the walls of their houses.
From this village we took a two or three hours walk in the nature.
Another of this kind of rocks.
Here the tree had to struggle to get up to the sky.
And this was how it looked where the tree went around the rock. When the wind move the tree, the tree made a whole in the rock.
Anthony enjoying the veiw and the stillness of the forest. Both of us liked this place very much and could imagine a life close or in such a forest.
View from where we stopped and ate our sandwiches.
Can you believe that we saw blueberries at this time of year! We didn’t try to taste them though.
When we came up to La Petit Pierre again we saw this castle, but only from the outside since it was closed on new years eave.
I just had to take a picture on this sculpture.
So, finally I want to show you the wonderful room where I and Anthony slept. It was newly renovated by his parents.
On the second of January we took Anthonys’ car back to the south. Eric, his girfriend and their cat travelled with us in the car. It takes approximately ten hours to drive down.
09.06.06
Posted in Hollidays, Visitors at 2:19 pm by tesstess
Today is the last day of my parents visit. They have been here for two weeks. The first night they slept in my appartment Katarina were here as well, so then we were five people. That was crowded. Still crowded with four and it will be quite empty now when they leave.
Dad got the best place: on the balcony. Or, it was the best solution for the rest of us not to have to wake up from him snooring. Luckily it didn’t rain once!
The first day of their visit I was working, and their goal of the day was to find Carrefour (the supermarket) and to eat at a nice French restaurant (the one you can see above). Unfortunately they didn’t manage to find Carrefour because of all roundabouts and the lack of a good map. And I’m sad to tell that the restaurant was one of their worst experiences on the whole trip. They have explained in great detail to me exactly how awfull and uneatable the food was.
Can you spot us?
In the weekend we wanted to take the boat to outside of Cannes (where Katarina went), but when we came to Cannes we found a nice parking which was just at the beach and where we could only stay for two hours so we decided to stay at the beach there. Definitely too many people for our tastes, but it’s fun to have seen once. The icecream was good.
After swimming we took a walk in the harbour. The boats are so luxury and expensive it’s difficult to understand that anyone with a normal job can afford them. Probably they can’t, probably they’re rich of other reasons than working hard for it.
Story to be continued…
07.30.06
Posted in Hollidays, Lindy Hop at 8:16 pm by tesstess
This week I have been in Herräng, the Lindy Hop Mecca. Except during four weeks in summer Herräng is a small, sleeping village an hour above Stockholm. Then suddenly thousands of dancers invade the place and makes it alive. To be there is for me as being in a totally different world, not connected to my everyday life.
Me and Magnus attended the camp the fourth week and did the “competition and show” course. It is the first time we do this course which focus much more on show and on aerials (acrobatics), but it is my fourth year in Herräng. I longed to get here again from the last day of last year’s camp.
The first day of the course the comp & show people has to be divided into two groups. I was nervous for this audition weeks before the camp. First they (the three teaching couples of the course) taught us a short routine which I think we made quite ok, but then came a solo charleston routine, which both me and Magnus had some troubles with and in the end we didn’t manage to get into the best group which we had hoped for. I was really affected by this. I had thought I would be disappointed, but not totally depressed for a whole day! I seem to be more of a competing person than I thought. What was good is that they taught the same material to both groups. Next year, I tell myself, then we will have practiced much more and we will be in the best group, so that I can get to know more good dancers and dance with them at nights. Of course I can dance with them anyway, it’s just to ask them, but it is so much more fun if it’s a wish from both sides to dance.
One class each day we did aerials on a big football field. This is what I and Magnus love the most, and this year we learnt three or four new aerials and got more theory on some we knew from before.
Here is what my schedule looked like most days:
09-10 Breakfast
10-17 Three or four classes a 1 hour and 20 minutes, and breaks in between where we had sandwiches and chocolate. One kilo of chocolate we ate this week, half a kilo each.
18-19 Dinner
20-00 Sleep
01-05 Dance
05-08 Sleep
This way I missed the evening meetings where the whole camp gathers and Lennart, who is one of the key persons at the camp sits at the stage and tells stories, shows old movies and people comes up on stage to perform or talk. It’s always lots of crazy things going on at those meetings. I’m sad that I missed them, but this year I really wanted to dance as much as possible. The dance floor is too crowded between ten and midnight and most often I have the best dances very early in the morning when most people are gone to bed and only the most lindy loving dancers are left.
Next year we’ll go for more than one week, so that I can focus on social dancing one week and on courses the next. Some people spend the entire four weeks in Herräng. I think people from abroad get a pretty strange picture of Sweden when Herräng is the only place they see. There are lots of people from the US, France, Germany, Russia, Spain, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and more. Everyone speaks English at all times. Sometimes it takes quite a while before you notice the person you’re speaking to is actually from Sweden and you don’t have to speak Swedish at all. I must say it’s much better than in France, because as soon as one in a big group of people are from somewhere else, English is the given language, whereas here in France as soon as there is more than three French people in the same group, the given language is French…
There was a pool at the camp area this year, Marcus and Ellen jumped in after some hesitation. I also saw couples doing aereals from outside the pool, into the pool which was really cool, but unfortunately I didn’t manage to catch them with my camera.
This year my entire body was acing after just a few days, and after four days I caught a cold and slept one whole night and did no courses the next day. This is normal at Herräng, I get it every year. Fortunately this year I got better again and could dance from one o’clock at night until half past nine the next morning of my last day. Then two hours later, after breakfast, packing and cleaning I managed to drive two hours of the way home before I got to dangerous and have to hand over the driving to the others.
07.16.06
Posted in Hollidays at 9:42 pm by tesstess
Pavia is a small, old and beautiful town just south of Milano. Joakim, a friend from dancing at home has lived there for one and a half year and now we took the chance to visit him.
The appartment was charming, newly renovated in a very old house.
View from the balcony. From here you could see roof tops and several old churches, all of which did their best in waking us up in the morning with their bells.
These are the stairs up to his attic appartment. Lock closely and you see that there seems to be no support under the stairs. They made you walk them quickly.
This is a big castle in Pavia.
On Saturday we went to visit a monastory outside of Pavia.
Then of course we ate Italian food. Joakim made us some really nice food 
We couldn’t have found a better cook!
And then we played Settlers, of course.
07.02.06
Posted in Hollidays, Sweden at 10:51 am by tesstess
On my first day in Sweden, me, Magnus, my parents and my grandparents went out on the sea. The west coast of Sweden with all its islands is really beautiful. I’m so happy I had time to go out and enjoy it this summer!
Before going out one of the ropes got caught in the propeller but Magnus and dad soon solved the problem and we could go out on the sea. My dad was driving and the rest of us tried hard not to be weat, because the water was splashing up over the boat when going fast.
When coming out a bit on the ocean we stopped and put in the anchor. My grandparents used to go out a lot to fish when they were younger, now they need someone to come with them and drive the boat. Here is my grandpa and mom in action getting a fish each. In the end grandpa had caught three mackerels and mum one.
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