And thus it began. The season of the perhaps highest highs and the lowest lows of the student life season. Students are sat with their backs to the sun-warm stone wall of Lund Cathedral, iced coffee in hand. Exams are piling up and hours under the light of green lamps in the library are long. Lund’s City Park is slowly filling up with picnic blankets, cheap prosecco and bravo orange juice in paper cups. Balconies are becoming overcrowded with winter-pale chests and plates of strawberries not yet in season. Occasionally, wet snow falls on windowsills at night. On restaurant sundecks, people are stubbornly sipping cold beers crowding under heating lamps and Carlsberg branded fleece blankets. The air smells of fertilizer from the outskirts of town, lighter fluid from courtyard barbeques, and pollen from trees. And of course, it is the month of Valborg celebrations.
Provided you choose to go all out, the celebrations extend over a four-day period. On each consecutive day, one, or a couple of, events are held by student nations across Lund. In order to attend said events, one must acquire a ticket. In order to acquire a ticket, one must endure collective madness. This is me accounting for my experience.
It was a perfect spring day. I awoke to birds chirping. I had my morning coffee and sat on my windowsill in a robe. Sun reflections of trees and clouds danced on my bedroom wall. My friends and I agreed to install ourselves in the line for Kvalborg at 3 pm. A solid plan, consulted by “förmän” responsible for arranging the whole event. A good 18 hours had to be enough to secure the tickets, right? Come 1 pm, the group chat is in full panic mode. Someone has reported that the queue is filling up, and people with their camper chairs are spotted all across town heading towards Västgöta nation. All plans are cancelled, and responsibilities dropped. We jog to the closest supermarket, hastily throw whatever snacks are closest into our cart and head off.
We get there. It is crowded already. We suppress the infringing feelings of frenzy, collect queue tickets and start building a camp. The telt gets installed, the chairs popped open, and the speaker is connected. We lay down in the grass just beside the line, wearing solely skirts, shorts, and tank tops. We play games, challenge each other to catch thrown grapes without hands, bask in the sunlight, our youthful minds still naively saturated with optimism. We spend a fifth of our monthly rent to order food that is delivered to us, and we eat. 
Dusk falls. Around us, people are making acquaintances with strangers, bonding over matching neck pillows and laughing together over the fact that what has felt like an eternity has solely been one hour. Evening becomes night. We are cold. We are tired yet we cannot sleep. Tucked in our chairs under scarves, spare leather jackets wrapped around our legs, and doubled-up beanies on our heads we start to count down the hours. Only nine to go. The cold creeps closer, first nibbling fingertips, soon penetrating marrow. We are unsure if we will ever know warmth again. In desperate attempts, we pull wool socks higher up our legs and breathe warm air in our cupped hands. Minutes feel like hours. We start to question things – everything.
Why are we suffering through the night, a good 21 hours, to spend a measly 3 hours at the same student nation we spend time every other weekend for a tenth of the price? Do we actually like the artists that will perform or did we just persuade ourselves we do? What’s the point of anything?
And then the first bird chirps again. And the sky’s shade of blue shifts from a deep Oxford blue to a cobalt. And we see people twisting and turning in their tents. Tentative conversations from people still in the wasteland of sleep and wake. And there is hope again. And then the sun rises, and all the stiff limbs and blood circulation lost and lips turn purple and questions are forgotten. We see a spot of sun on the grass again, and we rush there, though we are not really warm yet, we hug and bounce on the spot and congratulate each other on the accomplishment of surviving the completely self-inflicted suffering. And we go home, and we have the tickets, and we look forward to Valborg weekend.
Was it worth it? You ask. I don’t know. I will not indulge in the idea that possibility it was not. I will look forward to the Valborg weekend and I will make sure to enjoy every second of it, but no matter what, it was an experience. Slightly estranged from the world of proper adults, a shared understanding for strangers much like friends, new connections, crappy sleep and unsustainable eating habits, it felt like the epitome of student life.
To round this all up, I present to you the collective wisdom gained after our experience, and hope it can bring you some ease if your first all-nighter is still ahead of you:
- We brought a tent, the pop-up kind naturally, to preserve our energy. Learning to put up an actual tent we figured could be saved until proper adulthood. It was a nice addition, even if mostly for the ambience, but did not provide much practical value (read warmth) as we forgot the sleeping pads. Do better than us – bring the pads!
- Shoes that are too tight cancel out the effect of double pairs of wool socks – maybe this is common knowledge, maybe it is not, either way, we learned the hard way.
- A small speaker and mental occupation were our best friends – we overpacked with a herd of board games and different decks of cards but found most of them best case poked at, mostly untouched. Instead, time lapsed way faster with mindless chatter, word games came up at the spot and a little Veronica Maggio. (Of course, I was blessed with wonderful company – so there’s that too!)
Writer’s note: The experience has been slightly exaggerated for entertainment purposes. Do not be discouraged.
