Wednesday 8 August 2012

Stockholm Pride Parade 2012

We continued to enjoy the gorgeous summer weather Saturday afternoon, by joining the over half a million people (!) out on the streets to watch the Stockholm Pride Parade!

Stockholm Pride is the biggest annual gay event in the Nordic countries, and it's a whole week full of events, seminars, debats, exhibitions and celebrations around town; finished off by this big parade. About 45,000 took part in the parade this year, on about 150 floats, trucks and cars. It was very glitzy, happy and colourful and the atmosphere was fantastic!


At first we stood up by Slussplan, at Räntmästartrappan to try and catch some glimpses of the many floats and participants, but there was just SO many people! Lucas had to take the following photos from Nathan's shoulders:

































We met up with another old friend of mine (we've known each other since our au pair years in Paris 20 years ago), Jenny-Ann.


Then we decided to start walking down Skeppsbron, meeting the rest of the parade, and could get a bit of a better view of the floats. Here was one with a few Swedish "celebrities":











We were anticipating a lot of questions from the kids, but they didn't seem to think anything different was up. They liked the loud music and the happy people.
Apart from Lucas who at one point, after about an hour of the parade, asked Nathan why "some of the people were acting a bit gay?".
Nathan wondered, why did he think that?
Lucas answered "Because there are a lot of men in women's clothes".

Ha ha, there was also some people getting whipped, some dressed top-to-toe in leather; topless and bodypainted women, men saddled up like horses (?) and other quite odd and far-out things, at least for a child.
But no comment about those!

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