Travel Blog

Our second night in Lund happened to be Culture Night, a once-a-year celebration of music throughout the university town. Walking through the campus we passed students heading to a dance, the men in dark suits, the women in long dresses, their blond hair lit by the late-summer sun.

After dinner with friends, Polish doctors working in Lund, we walked to the Romanesque cathedral that dominates downtown. We found five seats near the back and listened as a black-robed choir sang liturgical music. Touring the empty cathedral the day before I had thought how wonderful it would be to hear a choir in this great sanctuary, and now I was hearing one, surrounded by a hushed, multi-generational crowd. Before this moment, I had only heard Swedish choirs on classical music stations at Christmas. Or on A Prairie Home Companion.

After the concert we found a courtyard where a band was playing blues. Jacek said that some of his colleagues were singing in the building behind us so we headed inside. (Blues I can get at home.) A group of about thirty people, the majority of them middle-aged women, belted out "A Hard Day's Night." Then they sang a Swedish song. 

They all worked at the local hospital. "Seven hundred thousand Swedes," Jacek told me, "sing in choirs."

They sang "When I'm Sixty-Four" like all the other numbers, with a contagiously delighted gusto. During one of the last songs, a man in a bright red sportcoat detached himself from the group and spoke very rapidly into the microphone. "He says that singing is good for you," Jacek translated. In all my travels, Lund was the first city where I thought it wouldn't be so bad to be hospitalized.