On the long list of weird Swedish midsummer traditions, there is the frog dance.
Although it isn't technically just a frog dance. The dancing and singing also cover foxes on ice, violin players and tripping crows. But for some reason the frogs are the ones that seem to stick with people.
The concept is very simple, there's a floral maypole that Dr Freud would have a thing or two to say about, and people will dance and sing around it in celebration of summer. Although very few of the songs relate to summer. The frog song for example is primarily about how funny the frogs look and that they have no tails or ears. It's quite mean to frogs really.
Anyone who know me will be very well aware that I do not enjoy dancing. At all. I do not go out with the intention of dancing and if it does happen it can be guaranteed that I am either extremely drunk or stuck in a social situation where dancing is required as part of the etiquette protocol. And even then I'm doing it under protest, wrapping it up as quickly as humanly possible.
The frog dancing however is not so much dancing, but jumping - so I joined in this time around. The last time that happened I was wearing a scrunchy, which means I was too young to have any sense and too old to blame not walking as a reason for refusing to dance.
So me, Hell's Bells, Babushka about a 1000 other people joined forces around the smallest maypole in the world. Another few thousands were watching the event of which the majority looked like they'd mistakenly wandered into a mental institution by mistake.
I decided the reasonable thing to do was grab the closest confused person and force them to join the festivities. In this case a semi naked Australian man. I really wish it had been someone wearing at least a shirt. But I have to hand it to semi naked Australian man, he did hell of an air violin and an even better air flute.
And guess what, frog dancing actually turned out to be a lot of fun. And great as cardio!
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