Graduating students, celebrating life with lots of champagne.
There’s a steady thump, thump, thump of bass mixed with lots of yelling and horn honking. As the noise gets louder, Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance becomes clear, mixed with the shouts of about 40 just graduated high school students jam-packed onto the back of a flat-bed truck. It all means just one thing: it’s graduation time in Sweden.
The last two weeks have been a frenzy of students celebrating their final day of school in a similar manner. On the final day of school, students come running out of their school – girls dressed in white, and most all wearing sailing caps on their heads embroidered with their name and school – to be greeted by friends and families holding signs with pictures of the graduate as a child.
And then the students party: typically, classmates hire a truck, decorate it with Swedish flags, birch branches and banners and then drive around town, drinking champagne and dancing. Yesterday it was raining, but the tradition went on anyway. I felt sort of bad for yesterday’s graduates, so I took their photo. They seemed to be having a great party in spite of it all.
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The hats are not sailor hats, even if they look a bit like that. They are old mill caps from mid 1800,
http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studentm%C3%B6ssa.
The color of the hat is to 95% white, but the hatband differs depending on what you have studied.
The traditions are quite strict, you are only allowed to wear it the last year of school and can only start after a hat-on-taking ceremony, usually takes place in end of April, where all students from that school that graduates get together and celebrate the start of the party times (last month in school).
Thanks for all the inside information on the hats Roger. I have to say that they still look like captain’s hats to me!
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