It has been about a month since I sat down and made any further record of my travels. I'm currently on a bus from Riga in Latvia to Vilnius in Lithuania. It's a 5 hour ride, and amazingly, there is internet on the bus. Technology just keeps on advancing...

First thing to update on, Herrang:

Herrang went well for the most part. I was one of the Week 3 party organizers, and it was a big job that took a lot of time and energy but it was worth it in the end. The theme was Superheroes, and I was working with Robert Klingval who is a crazy Swede, and a great guy to work with. People had been telling us for weeks that the party was going to be the best party ever, and so we had a lot to live up to, but I think that we did a great job in living up to the expectations. We had a comic book storyline going on, here is a basic summary.

Supervillians interupted a Superhero conference and captured the great Dawn Hampton, and they were using her energy to fuel a device that would put and end to good dancing forever. Superheroes had to disable the device by overloading it by dancing near it. At the end there was a showdown between the heroes and the villains featuring the one man dance with Superman (Lennart Westerlund), Invisible man (empty space), and Batman (Daniel Heedman); then little Oswald and Emi from Barcelona dancing poorly until Oswald got angry and ran offstage where Pep came in in green body paint as the Hulk and finished the dance; finally Kevin St. Laurent as Captain Swing and the rest of the Killer Dillers as the villains doing a fantastic "Aerials Battle" fight choreography; followed by the rescue of Dawn Hampton who did her Bhangra number and destroyed the device and saved dancing.

It was indeed the best party ever...

Some bad things happened though in Herrang, Isabelle and I had a falling out that is probably not recoverable from. It's a pity, but these things happen in Herrang. I'm not going to go into details, but needless to say there are multiple sides to every story.

Week 4 was Comp and Show classes with Johanna, which were a lot of fun, but hard work. Not quite as much work as 5 years ago when I did C&S the first time, but still good. One class was nothing but swingouts, and that night at the social dance I couldn't do anything but swingouts, which was kind of funny. My muscles just wanted to keep going with them.

After Herrang was over, I spent almost a week in Stockholm, then went down to Gothenburg in southwestern Sweden for the Gothenburg Lindy Exchange. It was a good event with a lot of live music. I played with the local band on the Saturday late night event, and many people said it was the best part of the event, so I'm glad to have been a part of that. I also did some DJing at the Sunday Lindy in the Park, at least until it was cut short by rain.

I returned to Stockholm, and the next day I got on the boat to Riga. It is a nice cruise ship that takes a leisurely 16 hours to cross the Baltic sea. I ran into Helena and Manuel, who are dancers who also happened to be going to Vilnius, so that was nice to have some people I know to hang out with. I also met a crazy Russian guy named Vanya who was my roommate. I should have known better than to say yes to his question, which was, of course "Do you want to drink with me?" The rest of the night is a drunken haze which involves some crazy lindy hopping to pop music with Manuel, and trying to play clarinet at 2am on the deck of the ship. Morning wasn't too bad though, except for a general lack of sleep, and that brings us up to where we are now...on the bus to Vilnius.