Even more of me

Yeah, so here's the last of them, for now.



And my view from the wall, plus my face way too close and a rather halfhearted wave...

And now for me (playing with my camera is dangerous)

I haven't gotten all the footage of me up, so here's what I've got thus far.

Realize, extreme corniness is going to follow, seeing as this is the first video I've ever taken of myself.



And the second one.



Stay tuned for more as I get it uploaded to youtube!

More adventures in Visby, Video Style

This video is of the Medieval dinner we had. Short and Sweet.


This is of a skeleton of a Female Viking that they dug up. All I could think of when I saw her jewelry, keys and knife is that for a Viking Woman, she was pretty rich to be buried with that stuff. I thought of Gangsters today.

But on a different note, I've always had this strange fascination with bones, with the graceful curve of skull and hip.

So here we go.



Last one here is of my favorite standing stone... made about the time Egyptians were alive, I think. They think there is some Egyptian influence in the boat, presumably to take people to the underworld.

My adventures in Visby

So this first one is of a grave we saw in one of the churches. I'm trying this post out with this one to see if it works before I get to the meatier stuff.

Oh, and Guthar and Gunnar are the same person. Gunnar is the right way to spell his name

That took most of the day, and we got back around three. We had just under an hour to freshen up and take showers if we were so inclined, and then it was back on the bus to go to a Viking Village. Daniel had been talking about this village all weekend, he was so excited. It ended up being quite cool, a neat mix of being geared toward tourists while still having historically accurate details. We got to wear Viking clothing over our own clothes, and the differences between the brown ‘dresses’ and the brown with purple ‘dresses’ divided us into teams. The first thing we had to do was create a cheer. Ours went as such:

We are the Slashers, the Stockholm Slashers

And we will eat you all for dinner,

We will pillage your village

And eat you with a side of vegetables!

Slashers, Slashers, Slashers

HUH!

Needless to say, it was amazing.

Then, we competed in such activities as spinning with a drop spindle (Guess who dominated that sport… you’re right… ME! Heh. And people say it’s a dying art), making a chain out of chain links, building a ‘house’ with pegs and wood, measuring in Göteborg Units (a real measurement that fell out of use 200 years ago), archery (I also dominated that sport, being the only person out of us to have both arrows hit the target… YEY for summer camp and teaching archery!), and throwing axes (I was quite bad). It was a lot of fun. I have some good pictures.

Next was dinner… again without silverware, this time without even knives. We had roast lamb, really roasted over a fire, and even the split skull was there! It was quite yummy. Then, after dinner we performed skits based off of a runic inscription we had to interpret. Our skit was quite funny, one because we had the characters, and then separate people who were the voices, so females were male voices, and it looked like bad Chinese dubbing. Ours was about Jack, from jack and the beanstalk, and how he goes to the heavens and finds a giant and Thor, god of thunder, fighting. After explaining that giants were an endangered species, Jack tricks the two into stopping fighting and leaving heaven so Jack can have heaven to himself. We also had pregnant pauses and other amusing stuff.

It was hilarious at the time, and since the humor isn’t something that can be explained, just trust me… I nearly peed my pants laughing.

After that we had a game where two people sat on a round log over mattresses and whacked each other with pillows until one fell off. It’s harder than you’d think… but I think girls have an advantage with their distribution of body weight. I actually won, surprising since I felt like the whole time I was going to fall off. I didn’t get pictures of me, but I got some great ones of other people.

So now the night’s over, we ended the Viking Village soon after, and headed home. Some people went to the pool and the sauna, but I forgot my bathing suit so I didn’t do that. I think most people are going out partying, but I’m planning on taking a shower and heading to bed… yes, eleven being relatively early, but for me pretty late. I’ll post this tomorrow, because I’m too lazy to do it now.

Hopefully tomorrow morning I can try to do my walk again.

Yesterday

I have decided that people don't read long posts, and because this is a long post, I'm going to divide it into two.

I was planning today to go walking around Visby in the morning and walk the wall that surrounds the city, but when I looked out the window I could see it was raining, and I decided against that idea. I wasn’t going to deal with the cold and rain in order to get my walk. So instead I went back to bed and slept for another hour. A good thing, because the day was packed full of stuff, so much so that I’m worried that I’m going to forget some of what we did.

We had breakfast, and left a nine to head out to look at some Medieval churches in the countryside. We passed Pippi Longstocking’s house, but we didn’t get to actually see it, much to my disappointment. We made our way to where ferry boats can take you across to Fåro (pronounced Fah *rolled r* oh) a nearby island. There we visited another church. This church is special because it is where Ingmar Bergman is buried. We got to see his grave. For those of you who don’t know, Ingmar Bergman is a Swede that created these very creepy movies that are very artsy and famous. The people of the island are extremely loyal to him, going to the point of misdirecting tourists who wanted to see where he lived. Bergman apparently was very generous to the community and also very private. However, Gunnar knew him personally, as did most of the people on the island, it being very small with the exception of when the tourist season happens. We made our way to one of the limestone beaches were we went climbing on rocks and enjoyed all the really cool fossils in the stones. (See pictures… I’ll post them later)

Meanwhile the whole time Gunnar told us stories about the countryside, ghosts that haunted churches, trolls that would come avenge themselves on you if you did them or their farm any wrong or violated a grave. We stopped at an amazing little bakery that made really good baked goods and had quiche. We got to see some people thatching a roof, and a bunch of windmills. Then we stopped at another beach were I went wading and took a bunch of pictures.

On the way back we stopped at a place where there were these standing stones formed in the shape of “boats” that were a type of grave, and other stones that made circular graves. Gunnar told us more about the two-foot tall trolls that fiercely guard the holy sites in Sweden against evil people or forces that would seek to destroy them. He also told us about how the landscape of the islands is created because of the livestock that live there… they keep most the trees from taking over the fields by eating them.

Then he took us to… well, the best description of it would be a cairn. It was a great stone mound with a crater in the center. According to Gunnar they are graves of very important people. It’s interesting, in Viking history there are all these amazing buildings and graves, and then later the society seems to have regressed- we can only guess why. Perhaps there was a disease that wiped out a large part of the population and the people could no longer create the great cairns that they liked to… perhaps a war happened or there was a great change that caused them to regress. But it was very fascinating to listen to Gunnar talk, in part because Gunnar has ties all over the island. He also has a brother who is an archaeologist, as has a result knows a lot about the island.

He was a really good tour guide. I’m going to write him a thank-you note.

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