Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Continued narrative from the Diary of the Concert at Marieham, 1930

Our first concert seemed to be quite a success although we were all very tired and most of us had colds. The hall was filled to over-flowing--many people were turned away, but still many of them stood outside. We had no piano--or I mean they had none--so we just sang our Swedish songs, and Mr. Jofs "speeched".

After the concert, they took us for a nice long walk to a hotel, where we had more smorgasbord and a very nice sociable evening was had by all. There was a German orchestra in one of the rooms so some of our crowd had a few dances. The choir sang for us and there were the usual speeches. The time went by so quickly and we had no idea it was so late until we heard the boat whistle. But the people were so bent on keeping us longer and longer that the boat called us three or four times before we finally got on our way. That evening we had our first experience with the light nights of Finland and Sweden, for it was almost as light as day when we walked from the hotel to the boat, and it was midnight!

We received a very pretty wreath from the Marieham choir which had printed on it's ribbons:-"Till Runebergordens Finland kör, fran Ålands sang och musik förbund."

There was quite as big a crowd down to see us off as there was to see us come. When the last one of us was on board they pulled up the gang plank and we starrted. We sang as we left--our favorite song "Set maskinen i gång". We waved and looked back at the people on the dock until Marieham was just a blur in the distance.

We were quite surprised to find out that the people of Marieham thought that we had our native costume one, inasmuch as all the girls had on some kind of a flowered dress.)

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