Picnicking in Swedish Summer
As strange as it may sound, summer has not arrived in Sweden yet. As I sit writing this piece, a weak sun flickers intermittently through a cover of clouds. The weather hovers around seven degrees, and the blowing wind makes it chillier. In the time of Covid, this feels like a double whammy. Not only we couldn’t manage to travel to another warmer country during the cold winter, the opportunity of enjoying summer for the entire summer season also seems fairly restricted.
We shouldn’t complain much though, for Sweden never imposed a formal lockdown. We can still go out and walk in the woods, and sit in cosy cafes and sip hot chocolate when it gets too cold outside. Now that the days have become longer, the urge to step outside has only increased. So despite the weather, I cover myself in a parka and take a walk. On most such occasions, my walks trace a familiar route that takes me through the city’s walking street, before I veer off into one of the largest parks in the city — Slottsparken. The city of Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city, where I live was once the most fortified city of medieval times when it was still a part of Denmark. Now that threat has disappeared, however the remnants of those times earmark the landscape, including the Malmö Castle that sits on the edge of the park (from where the park gets its name as castle is called Slott in Swedish).
A canal snakes through the park dividing it into two halves. On a sunny weekend, rare though it has been to find one this year, one can spot several boats dotting the canal, their occupants peddling in tandem with a leisureliness earmarked for holidays. In the open lawns, families and friends gather for picnics. These picnics remind me of my childhood when my father would drive us to a green part of the city, which was mostly outside the city boundaries where we would scout for a clean spot where my mother would unwrap the carefully packed food. The concept of picnics evaporated as I entered my teens and I looked back at them as things that we did when we were kids.
Here in Sweden though, picnicking outside in the summer month is almost like a national pastime enjoyed by not only families but also groups of students, and even office colleagues. As I walk through the park, I spot these groups sitting in the garden with their food spread out, while a portable music player plays music in the background. There is a mild cheer in the air, and a game of Kubb is not far away from where groups sit. Kubb (Viking Chess to the outsiders) is a lawn game where two teams aim to knock over wooden blocks called kubbar (and hence the name) by throwing wooden batons at them. The game is won by the team that manages to knock over the kubbars of the other team and also a centrally placed king-pin. It’s a game that people of all ages can play and that perhaps explains its popularity as a picnic sport.
Yet another popular activity that mark these picnics is slacklining. Slacklining is about balancing and walking on a soft and stretchy nylon-webbed wide strap (called slackline) which is usually tied between two trees. Slacklining is quite similar to tightrope walking but not in a way that puts one’s life in danger, but a more gentler sort where the slackline is tied between two trunks of the trees and never higher than a metre from the ground. This is a sport mostly reserved for the young, who practice walking on these slacklines while taking a break from eating and drinking.
I must confess that I have fallen for the idea of these picnics. Now I actually organise these together with our friends and where we pack our cucumber sandwiches and hot tea, and the bag of kubbs to carry with us. These picnics provide a relief — outside, away from large gatherings, we all sit and talk in small groups, comforting ourselves that though we can’t travel as often as we did earlier, we can still step out and enjoy the nature around us in bite sizes through these picnics.
The only challenge left is the weather. So, here I sit praying that the next weekend is a sunny one!
A version of this story was published in The Outlook Traveller
