Sweden and festivals!

Since I last wrote, I've been pretty busy doing a lot of fun stuff. After getting back from the Roskilde festival, Tanne and I spent a few days in Copenhagen to recover from the 8 days of mud, beer, lack of sleep and decent food...Luckily for us, it was the Copenhagen Jazz festival during those days, so we had some interesting music to keep us occupied.

While maybe not as well known as the Montreal Jazz festival, the Copenhagen version is definitely pretty cool. On any given day there were 20+ musical performances throughout the city, and many were really good. Tanne and I managed to check out a few of them....

At the end of the week we headed off to Sweden to visit Tanne's family's summer house. It is located in a region called Småland, which is about 200kms from Copenhagen. It is a really nice place, with beautiful wilderness and really cute old houses that really give you the feel of being transported back in time in some way. At the house where we were, all cooking was done on an old-fashioned iron wood stove which gave new meaning to the idea of slow food.

While there we took a lot of time to go on walks around the house, picking berries and breathing fresh air (something that one doesn't really think about when living in a city). We also rented a canoe one day and went for a 20km trip down-river. It was a very relaxing day (no rapids), just taking our time paddling down the meandering rivers. ahhh....just writing about it is bringing back good memories....

Once back from Sweden we went to another small music festival called Nakke festival. It is located in the Northern part of Denmark in a beautiful coastal region. Compared with the Roskilde festival, this one is really small and intimate. There were just over 1000 people there and really small danish bands of very diverse genres. It was really cool to hear new music from bands that are completely unknown to you. Even though the bands were pretty unknown (even within Denmark) many of them were really talented and put on a great show. The weather was awesome for us, which was definitely a nice change from the Roskilde festival, so it was nice to be outside, drinking beer, listening to good music without any worries....

I am back in Copenhagen now. We will stay here for the week and head out for another road trip to Jutland (The peninsula that juts out from the north of Germany). While there we will visit Tanne's grandmother and my friend Anna whom I met a few years ago in Toronto while she was on exchange at Centennial. We are also planning to travel around the western part of Jutland to see some of the amazing coasts and beaches that Denmark has. Hopefully the weather will hold up for us!!