vappen & ammunitionen*

[cimorene]

walking the dog today--that is, 8 pm wednesday--i was surprised to see an unusually high quantity of (a) vomit, (b) people carrying 24-packs and larger cases of beer, and (c) people drinking on the street. at first i was confused.

then i remembered it's almost vappen--mayday eve. this is a really, really big deal up here; there's not so much with the bloody sacrifices and other rites of pagan origin anymore, but still there's excitement in the air. yay for junk food, fizzy wine, margaritas¹, cider, and possibly vodka! even though last year it was kind of a disaster (well, okay, only the outdoors part was a disaster, the slasha party was greatness itself), at this point i feel like i could really use it. and there's excitement in the air, as i believe i mentioned. it was almost palpable when i was outside. or that could just be my extremely high sensitivity to sunlight as per seasonal affective disorder.

in other news, i had tezuka/ryoma dreams last night, but i didn't write them down and i don't remember them anymore.


* ahaha, i kill me. and it doesn't even make any sense as a pun.
1. we all know i've been looking for an excuse to buy the ingredients for these since february anyway.

Comments

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

What is Vappen? I've never heard of it, and I thought I'd heard of most Scandanavian holidays! Google is not helping me, except that it seems to involve drunken Finns, but frankly that doesn't narrow things down much.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

you'd probably have better luck finding it by the finnish name, which i think is "vappu". nowadays, it's celebrated by all the high school graduates in the country, more or less--they retain a tradition here where everyone wears these incredibly silly looking graduation hats which have been the same for a very long time. the educated used to wear them all the time, but now they only wear them for vappen festivities. everyone in the town goes to one place around sunset. they all sing loudly in unison and throw their hats in the air and crack open the alcohol and then wander around drinking. there are traditional university student things, such as putting a giant graduation hat on a statue (this happens both in helsinki and here, with two different statues. ours is a statue of a river nymph which is near the river). and the school's orchestra is out there, too. in turku-Ã¥bo, the finns and swedish finns gather in two separate places. the finnish celebrations are slightly different, i gather.