I’ve just ended another week on Gotland. My friends live a short drive from Visby, and they invited me back after my first stay. I was happy to see it in the summertime. I should have spent more time roaming the countryside during the good weather;¹ I’ve got an standing invitation back but it’s unlikely I’ll return before winter does.

I had flown through Helsinki, landing late on a Saturday with my connecting flight departing the next day. Helsinki has a number of hotels a short walk from the terminal,² which was a blessing when I forgot to adjust my clock and found out, while still lounging in bed, that my flight was leaving in 80 minutes.³ I was mildly panicked but got through security in a matter of minutes and landed in Stockholm by early afternoon. I wanted to catch the ferry to Visby but the only available tickets got in close to midnight and a round trip ticket for the 40 minute flight cost less money.⁴

The island really is transformed during the warmer weather. The population’s normally 60,000, but the number of residents more than doubles over the summer months⁵ and that doesn’t include the number of visitors coming on cruise ships.⁶ The visitors are a mix of those with second homes on the island and tourists, and it’s causing some problems since both are causing housing costs to skyrocket. It’s apparently difficult to find housing to rent year round.⁷

It’s a shame, because Visby really is a delight in good weather, with an overabundance of historic buildings and charming streets to ramble through. I’d probably love it in the shoulder season, when the crowds have died down but before the autumn chill sets in.⁸ But I was mostly there to visit my friends, and so I spent a lot of time outside of the city, talking about larp and pitching projects⁹ and discussing politics. All for the best. I couldn’t have afforded more than a couple days in the city, given the cost for a hotel room.

The reason for visiting this week, as opposed to all the other weeks, was that it overlapped with the big Gotland Medieval Week festivities. My friends and I spent a number of days wandering around the festival during my stay. It’s the largest historical festival in Sweden and has been running since 1984. The attendees get a little prickly if you compare it to a Renaissance Faire, as there’s a much greater focus on demonstrations and historical authenticity.

That’s somewhat true. Certainly there’s a lot of lectures on topics like “Food and Power in Medieval Sweden” and “The Hanseatic League: The Rise and Fall of a Trading Empire”¹⁰ instead of the “Dunketh ye olde jester!” carnival sideshow booths or juggling buskers in pirate garb you might otherwise find. Instead of scripted skits from a roaming royal court most of the entertainment is confined to stages and they seem to feature a lot of storytelling. I was digging the more academic vibe.

But for every vendor selling cast iron forged in a lovingly recreated blacksmith’s workshop or stalls with bolts of historically available wool or linen you’ll find three selling role-playing games or coffee and pastries or cheap jewelry with new-agey crystals embedded in it.¹¹ Lots of people turned up in wimples and kirtles with Reeboks poking out from beneath the hem. A friend of mine bought a dragon hand puppet for their daughter. And the food, somewhat disappointingly, was your usual assortment of crepes and pizza and sandwiches.¹²

All of which is fine, even good. I’m sure many of the attendees were a lot happier being able to buy a latte or a cappuccino on site.¹³ It’s a stretch to say there was a big focus on authenticity, though, more like a gentle slant towards information over entertainment, like the difference between The Great British Bake-Off and Top Chef.

In fact, the best thing I saw while I was there was a cooking competition. Teams were provided with a bunch of ingredients available in the area during the Middle Ages and took turns choosing from the supply. They then had two hours to cook over open fires using period cooking tools. Even without understanding the commentary it was fun to watch,¹⁴ and could have been great with more comfortable seating and better presentation.

The rest was kind of uneven, for me. There was a big larper gathering on Thursday where I got to spend a couple hours hanging out with a friend.¹⁵ I tried and failed twice to eat at the Kapitelhusgården, a 12^th century chapter house run as a medieval restaurant over the summer.¹⁶ The whole thing seems like the kind of thing that’s great if you’ve been attending for a decade, where you have people to meet up with and a campsite to hang out around. As someone who doesn’t speak Swedish, I was locked out of a lot of what I was most interested in. I was happy to have gone but I don’t feel any pressing need to go back.

I headed back to the mainland, booking a cheap hotel by the airport for a few days while I waited for my flight back to the UK. I’ve got a bunch of friends in Stockholm which I dearly wanted to see, but I needed some quiet time to myself and didn’t reach out to anybody. My sincere apologies if I missed you; I’ll need to make it up the next time.

I’m returning to the UK this morning for what, at the end of the month, will be the first of three larps in September. I’ve done basically no preparation for any of them, despite all the free time I’ve had recently. I’m still mulling over what I want to be doing for the next year, which leads me to think about where I want to be in five years, which leads me to thinking about where I want to be in twenty, and that’s a lot to think about. So I’m mostly thinking about a week at a time. I’ll get my head around the big picture eventually. I usually do.

Next: London (STN) to Bucharest (OTP)
Prev: Lisbon (LIS) to Helsinki (HEL)

Footnotes

¹ Well, it rained a lot, but the weather was still a lot better than winter.

² Including both the Comfort Hotel Helsinki Airport and the Comfort Hotel Xpress Helsinki Airport, so if it’s late and you’re exhausted from traveling — not an unlikely possibility, since you’ve opted for an airport hotel — you’re almost certain to mix them up. I walked the five minutes to the train station to the wrong one and had to walk back to the correct one. The signage isn’t great.

³ It’s a two hour difference between Lisbon and Helsinki, and my computer doesn’t automatically adjust its timezone because if you turn that on it sets its clock against every VPN you connect to, so I thought I had time to kill before starting my day. It turns out I did have time — I was through security and at the gate in 10 minutes — but I’m always worried it’ll take forever.

⁴ It’s hard to imagine the outrage if they were to ban those short-haul flights and all the rich Stockholmers had to take the train to the ferry to visit their summer homes. I’d have kind of thought the EU would have cracked down on those sort of things by now, but I guess we’re all gonna have to wait for electric planes in 2050.

⁵ Apparently the ferries carry more than 1.5 million people every year, with another 350,000 flying back and forth

⁶ Cruise ship traffic had fallen off because the harbor couldn’t support the bulk of modern cruise ships, but as of 2018 a new $40,000,000 pier was built. There were always a few massive ships looming over the harbor when I was there.

⁷ This is a problem in a lot of places, where once enough of the business gets focused on seasonal tourism it can cause a cascading effect. It gets far more expensive to stay over the summer, which drives out people who would otherwise stay year round, which makes non-seasonal businesses less profitable, which encourages locals to switch to seasonal businesses, which in turn drives more tourism, which jacks up prices even higher.

⁸ Hotel prices in Visby seem to drop about 25% from summer to autumn and 50% from summer to winter.

⁹ As usual, I have a number of ideas and require collaborators to make them happen. I’m hopeful at least one or two will come to fruition.

¹⁰ All in Swedish, so I tragically had to skip them all. I would have gone to a bunch.

¹¹ Lots of the jewelry was handmade and some of it looked quite lovely, but not period.

¹² I ordered a “Veggie Po’ Boy” which was, in fact, a falafel wrap. I brought it up enough that people got the impression I was offended by it, when really I was just utterly baffled. A po’ boy is really defined by the bread it’s served on, which is a kind of low-flour French baguette. Why not just say you’re selling falafel wraps?

¹³ One vendor set up a row of shiny modern espresso machines staffed by baristas. There was a perpetual line.

¹⁴ I was assured by a Swedish-speaking friend I wasn’t missing anything; the commentary was subpar.

¹⁵ In the midst of 200 Swedish larpers I’ve never seen before in my life, a good reminder that the kind of larps I attend regularly represent a very small subset of larps in general, which is itself a very small hobby.

¹⁶ We hadn’t gotten a reservation so ended up waiting for when they opened. The first day they didn’t have any space available when we were free, so we came back the next and snagged a spot at 7pm.

We came back at 7 to discover a long line outside in the rain; the kitchen was apparently backed up. We waited in line for a half-hour before we got inside, at which point the host discovered the table we were assigned was still occupied by diners waiting for their food. We stood around awkwardly in the middle of the dining room for five minutes, eventually got moved to a side table, spent 10 minutes waiting for someone to check in on us or take our orders, and finally gave up.

Disappointing, to be sure, but I get the sense the best part of the experience was the architecture, and all that waiting did give me ample opportunity to ogle the building. So maybe I got the better end of the deal.