Friday, January 2, 2009

Vintersolstånd

Joe It's been a while now, but with all the excitement Christmas we neglected to mention one of our Jul week activities: on the solstice we went to Gamla Uppsala and had a picnic. It was a thing we had talked about doing for a while, but the solstice came on the day after my last exam was due, so I hadn't done a lot of preparation in advance. Nonetheless, Sunday morning dawned bright and clear, if somewhat late (the sun came up at 8:50 that morning), and it seemed like we should take advantage of the weather. So I tramped off to the store and got some cheese and crackers, Jennifer made a thermos of tea, and then we hopped a bus to Gamla Uppsala.


What with the getting up late, the morning's indecision, the trip to the store, and then the wait for a couple of busses, it didn't exactly turn out to be an early picnic: it was 1:30 when our bus pulled up to the Groaplan stop and let us out. We picked a nice spot south of the burial mounds and ate our lunch, very grateful for the hot tea. An older couple who happened to walk by seemed to think that we were picnicking out of season (or possibly that we were too close to the path—our communication was not entirely successful; nevertheless, they were nice enough about whatever was wrong), but we were pretty happy with it.

Best part of all: at 2:45 the sun went down, so we didn't have to admit that we were too cold to stay any longer, but could blame it on the twilight instead.

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