Well last night, April 30th, was Valborgsmässoafton / Walpurgis Night / Valborg in Sweden. The "Welcome back Spring!" party, which also seems to have something to do with witches, but we couldnt figure out what that was... it's not like at Midsummer's when they burn a fake witch.
Anywyas, Cailan and I walked down to to the Castle and met up with some of her co-workers to watch archers shoot arrows of flames from the castle walls into a big floating raft of tree branches. After a choir that was also standing on the castle sang traditional spring songs for about an hour which was followed by tons of fireworks. It was cold out and started to ran. Cailan and I hoped that we could go to one of the surrounding cafes to watch the fireworks, but we were slapped on the wrist for suggesting something so preposterous, we needed to follow tradition and watch them in the rain. Ugh. They were super impressive though. Directly above us, the ash from them ended up in our hair.
After standing in the rain, oooing and awing at the light show we headed off for a drink of pear ciders and then home. Standing in the cold rain was not doing wonders for the cold that I have contracted. Unsurprisingly enough, I woke up this morning to discover that I thus passed my congestion on to Cailan. Awesome times. Now we are both hanging out in our one room apartment drowning in kleenx. Ugh.
The science fair went well on Thursday, I toughed it out, despite how sick I was, as you can tell by my extremely unflattering picture to the right.
The projects varied in talent, like always. I was a judge for the grade nines and the winning project blew me away. They designed and built an iBike. Seriously, they took a bike, wired a generator to the back wheel, which when the wheel was turning generated power to a small battery which thus charged the ipod which was attached to the handle bars. They made two different generations, one with a diode to save energy and one with out. They made commercials for it and have them on youtube, unfortunately I couldnt find it or I would have posted it. These kids were so smart! Of course I gave them all Excellent's. Not only was their project smart (they wired a bicycle!) but they were also excellent presenters and had terrific English.
3 comments:
Wow Sarah that iBike sounds pretty snazzy. You should sneak the schematics to it back home. By the way I'm not sure if you will remember this but in Fantasia, Walpurgis Night is when the last song "Night On Bald Mountain" takes place. It's supposed to be the night when all the witches in Europe come together on top of Brocken in the Harz mountains.
Oooh! That makes sense, I had read earlier that they burned fires to keep away walking bad spirits, and I guess witches would fall into that category. Ugh, I never liked that last song...
The bike is basic grade 9 battery systems. Or so I was told. Science is not my forte boy, but Im sure you could figure it out.
I enjoyed reading your blog sarah....very interesting stuff.....have a great time ok
Love Uncle Paul
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