kicking things off with a parade

Last weekend was a nice, long, four day weekend. I think it was for most of Europe, whether they were celebrating May Day: for workers rights; or Ascension Day: a Christian holiday; or even Walpurgis Night or Day: a confused holiday for either Pagans, Satanists, or Roman Catholics.

In Göteborg they celebrate Walpurgis Night with a parade by Chalmers (a University in Göteborg) through the middle of the city. The parade is called The Cortège and students have been selling programmes for the event on the streets for a couple of weeks beforehand. The programme tells you what the floats in the The Cortège are all about. The Cortège satirises the previous year's worth of news, current affairs, and the affairs of shady celebrities.

A colleague of mine from Australia, Deepika, has an apartment overlooking the route of The Cortège, so we were able to avoid the crowds, and frantically try and work out what the hell each float was all about. Between bad attempts at translating the Swedish in the program, a little local knowledge and watching the floats, we were able to work out most of them.

Here are some of the floats. Such as this one, regarding the attempts to shut down The Pirate Bay, a Swedish bit torrent tracker:

Quite a number of the floats seemed to be a good excuse for the male students to cross dress. Paris Hilton is an easy target...

And the final photo I'll put here shows that Göteborg has the opposite problem to Melbourne with the weather forecasts: they get told it'll be sunny, but it seems to always rain! Can't say that's really been my Göteborg experience so far... thankfully! As usual more photos are here.