Loving Life Blog

I heard a discussion about vacations on the radio the other day. The lady who was interviewed always went for reading vacations to a sunny beach with a carry on suitcase filled with books. That way she could experience everything under the sun that she wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. My vacation so far has more been like a work camp with gourmet food and great company, or … yoga retreat. I have listened a lot to the radio, and there are three hits that seem to reoccur constantly:

1. I’m in love in a fairy tale by Alexander Rybak. I guess there is no secret that all Swedes secretly love the Eurovision Song Contest. This years winning song from Norway goes warm on the radio all day long. Last week when the singer Alexander performed at the Allsång på Skansen (Sing Along at Skansen) in Stockholm it also seemed like all Swedish girls are in love in a certain Norwegian fairy tail…

2. Hope and Glory with Måns Zelmerlöw, the Swedish counterpart who apparently also competed with this song in the Swedish Song Contest, but didn’t quite make it to first place. “Don’t stop – I’m still standing for hope and glory, I’ll be fighting for my love story, I’m still standing for hope and glory now. All the battles I lost and the battles I won, this will be the one, this will be the one…” Looking at youtube I find that also Måns apeared at the Sing Along at Skansen – this video made me laugh out loud – it shows more how a classical catchy “schlager” song would be back in the days when I would have recorded the program, written down all the lyrics, learned the choreography and dreamt of winning the contest (and that is a looong time ago… – still dreaming though 😉 ). See here for the 3rd and more soft version:

3. Radio ad for Bauhaus – I can do it myself. Or is it that they talk about the ads for Bauhaus and make parody of the painted idyll picture and a comparison of the families and couples who dogged maintain their summerhouses because they should be able to do it themselves… This week my mom and I have done it ourselves. I found myself standing in a backbend leaning out of the window towards the water grabing in the windowframe inside in order not to fall out, reaching higher, stretching my other arm, raising up in relevé in order to paint the whole area on the facade above the window and under the roof. The pose made me think of my yoga teacher back in San Francisco, Rusty Wells. I heard his voice, as he often state when we are in the more advanced unfomfortable poses: “if I took a photo of you now and sent to your mother she should not be afraid that you were dying – SMILE!” So I smiled. And my mom took a photo. If this had been at a yoga retreat they would have called it karma yoga, I’m sure.

This was a litle report from Sweden, or as they say on the radio show from Minnesota: “the land where the men are beautiful, the women are strong, and all children above average”…

Johanna