Popaganda Concert 2005

Saturday was Popaganda, a free summer concert in Stockholm. All the bands were Swedish and I hadn't heard of ANY of them. There are some good Swedish bands too like The Sounds, The Hives, Concrete, Cardigans, etc, but I guess they were all busy.

The guards wouldn't let us bring alcohol into the concert grounds. They sold little cans of beer inside for 30 Kronors which is kind of a lot so we had a picnic outside the gates where we could see the stage and Linda and Johan and Anna and Max and Osama (not bin Laden) and I drank 6 bottles of wine and feasted on bread and brie and pasta salad and stuff while we watched Ana Brun, a little Norwegian girl with a big voice.



As an American I thought it was funny that security guards were everywhere telling us where we could and could not sit to watch the concert from outside the gates. For instance we could not sit on a wall (which afforded the best view), and very strangely we could not sit on a bench... but sitting on the grass we perfectly acceptable. They didn't seem to care at all that we were using the University's grounds as an open bar. I must remind the European readers that in America its illegal to drink alcoholic beverages in public unless they are in paper bags(!) and even then its touch and go depending on what city you're in and what color your skin is and how many days you've gone without shaving and what mood the cop is in.

Ahem, so as soon as we finished the wine we went inside and the heavens opened up and it rained hard for the next four hours and the only thing I really got to see was a spoken word performance by an African Swede who looked and sounded very serious (if you feel bad for Africans in other non-African countries, imagine them in Sweden where some people have yet to see or talk to one on in real life). Still, overly serious people really annoy me and I cannot get too much out a spoken word performance in Swedish so I made frequent trips as usual to the beer tent even though the event was warm and dry under a tent.

Then it started raining even harder the temperature dropped 20 degrees and everyone went crazy running home and I lost Linda in the shuffle. I couldn't call her because my cell phone got waterlogged... so I went to Gamlastan to a pub I know with 50 Kronor pints of Guinness. USA versus England was on. I normally don't watch football unless the USA is playing because there is something perverse about watching the USA do something they are even worse at than foreign policy.

USA lost 2-1 but the fish and chips and Guinness were excellent.