There are many traditions during new year in Sweden, some strange, some not that strange, and some odd. We dress up, we have party's, we drink champagne, we do fire works. Pretty normal. Some Stays at church and pray during the night, some like us stayed at an dog friendly hotel together with 50-60 other dog families. ( dog friendly = no fire works), and some listens to the poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Ring out, wild bells read each year by different Swedish celebrities This is one of the last poems in Tennyson’s long masterpiece, In Memoriam (1850),Tennyson calls on the church bells to ‘ring out the old, ring in the new’, and to rid the world of the bad things that have occurred and to usher in a newer, brighter world. This New year the Swedish actor reading it changed some of the verses in the poem and even skipped the last words, with the Swedish state TVs knowledge and approval. The last words in the poem is like this: Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in
Living in a city as I am, in Malmo, Sweden, it feels natural to talk about bridges.In the year 2000 we got a bridge over the Sound to Copenhagen, Denmark. A bridge between two nations once fighting each other, now connected.We need to continue to build bridges, between different cultures, ideas, people etc. These bridges are harder to build but necessary in the society we have today.We need these bridges in order to reach people with the "Good news"