I flew through New York on my way to Stockholm. While waiting at the gate I saw a guy wearing a Chicago the Lindy City t-shirt so went up and introduced myself. We ended up meeting also a guy from LA that I'd met at Catalina (Andy). Andy and I even managed a couple of swingouts back by the bathrooms. (As someone put it, a new type of mile-high club :) Many hours later, we got to Arlanda and who should be waiting to pick us up but Pat! Within an hour of arriving I ran into Keith, Eman & Gavin (from Seattle).

Class stuff:
That first Friday and Saturday were semi-rest days. Dancing in the evenings but no classes. Classes started Sunday. I went to 3 Advanced lindy classes and one beg/int. boogie woogie. Because of the boogie class and one of the lindy classes that was all sailor kicks I ended up deciding to do boogie for the week. (Ben from Seattle twisted my arm a bit too). Ann & Christer from Sweden (they're also awesome lindy teachers) and Daniel & Collette from Zurich were the two sets of teachers. The class had a pretty wide range of ability from people good at lindy who were learning boogie (like Greg & Ben from Seattle) to complete beginners who didn't understand the concept of leading (or following from what I gather).

Boogie is a different style of (primarily 6-count) swing dancing. The lead/follow is more like west coast than lindy, and the styling is very different than either. It tends to be done to fastish music and involved (when you get better than I am) lots of fancy footwork. If anyone's interested in it ask me and I can show you the basic. I've heard rumors that Keith and Viola (who both took the int.adv class that week) might try to teach a workshop in it.

They run classes a bit differently there. You sign up for a level and a dance (boogie, tap or lindy). You have classes with the same group of people all week and the instructors tend to build on their classes throughout the week.

Throughout the week for the evening dances the upstairs (inside) ballroom was the lindy room and downstairs (outside) where the boogie dancers congregated. I tried to go back and forth between the two and found that I could fake boogie reasonably well, though my footwork tended to slip back into east coast more often than not.

One thing I really liked towards the end of the week was that the instructors teamed up and had the men teach one of the levels while the women taught the other, then swapped the next hour. When the men were teaching, we followers were mostly there for them to practice with, then when the women were teaching they came around and really concentrated on each of us offering pointers.

The bad thing about the week was that I messed up my right achilles tendon (probably from improper boogie technique) so that by the end of the week I had to sit out several classes and not dance much for the evenings.

Saturday was a rest day though, and Sunday I had acupuncture done. Between those (and a bunch of Advil) was feeling fine by Monday. It meant I'd skipped most of my Sunday classes though so missed out on the beginning of Eddie & Eva's jazz routine which I never caught up in.

I did Advanced lindy that second week. There were some great leads in the class and some that needed some help (like everywhere I guess). We had classes from Paul & Sharon, Eddie & Eva, Mattias & Asa, Katrine & Zaccariah (no idea how to spell his name), Frankie, & Chester Whitmore.

Paul & Sharon's were my favorites. They did a hip-hop-ish routine as a warmup and then primarily worked on a jazz routine (started non-partners and went into partnered), the songs for both of which got so stuck in my head that I just had to order the cds. The last class we had with them they did a bunch of partnering excercises much like they'd done at Catalina.

Eddie & Eva did a jazz routine, a routine that was all lead/follow and the last class worked on dancing to fast music. Frankie was Frankie :) Unfortunately the last class I had of the second week was Chester doing aerials for an hour of the 1:20 class. ("jump" "jump" "jump" -- unfortunately with landings between each of them).

The thing that struck me as a bit weird was that the same material (with perhaps a bit more tacked on the end) was taught to advanced extra as well.

Evenings:
Fridays at Herrang are party nights with a theme and lots of decorations. The first was Vegas (I was a tourist), second was Surreal Herrang (they sodded the entire floor in the room that was the bar! (and put the pool table back on top of it!)), 3rd was Heaven & Hell. They tended to be the business nights because there would be people there from the week that was ending, and people arriving for the next week, and apparently people from Stockholm just driving up for the evening (about an hour drive).

Wednesday nights are blues night. All slow music, all blues dancing, all night. (though the second week they played some argentine tango outside for part of the night). In some ways it made slow & sexy night at Monsters look very very tame.

Thursday was cabaret night. People did skits, sang (Lizzy), danced (some amazing hip hop), etc. Eman had a nice set of running "Herrang-Fu" brief skits.

The rest of the week were just normal evenings. Classes ran from 10 - 7 or so. (You'd have 2-4 a day with breaks between for naps, food, etc). There was a meeting (highly entertaining) run by Lennart around 9. Followed by optional classes (Salsa, Milonga, Hip-Hop, Balboa, etc) taught by random camp attendees, followed by dancing sometime around 11-12. It was generally too crowded to dance alot at the beginning. I was generally there until sometime between 3 and 6. Unfortunately I never quite made it all the way until breakfast like some people did. Only one night though did I go to bed while it was still dark (which was the night I didn't dance at all because of tendon pain).

Misc:
It rained the first week and a half I was there. Felt like Oregon but of course I'd forgotten my raincoat.

Next year I'm getting private accomodations! I actually slept pretty well on my mattress on the floor (because I was generally so tired) but having nearly 20 other people in the room got loud and annoying. Nearly every time I needed to go to the bathroom I had to wait in line. The showers in the basement of the gym were almost always cold.

The first week wasn't so bad noise-wise in the room, but the second week there was a group of swedish teenagers in the room. They were very nice (well, at least the guys - the girls were a bit aloof) but they weren't exactly quiet. Fortunatley they were in all of the same classes as me so at least when they woke me up before my alarm every morning it was only a few minutes before :) All good leads too. I asked one of them (19 years old) how long he'd been dancing and he said he'd started in 1995.

The entire camp was run in English but there were a lot of conversations going around that I didn't understand (mostly Swedish and German). It took me the entire two weeks to get used to the fact that signs around town weren't necessarily understandable to me. The Swedes in general had VERY good English. (American vernacular even).

Herrang the town is tiny. We over doubled the population the second week I was there. (the biggest week for the camp). The last day I was there I was finally able to go see the beach. Napped there for a bit between classes. There's one small store in town. They'd actually set up a mini "Internet cafe" in a closet off of their back room that you could sign up to use. I did briefly once and had SO much fun with the Swedish keyboard :) (mostly because all of the punctuation was moved).

That's about as much as I can think of at this point.. If you have any questions let me know. I got my pictures back today so I'm going to work on scanning.